Advancing the Biomedical Science of Resilience: A Discussion of Measures and Metrics

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) is partnering with the Trans-NIH Resilience Research Working Group to convene a workshop, “Advancing the Biomedical Science of Resilience: A Discussion of Measures and Metrics.” Organizers intend to use this workshop to identify and evaluate measures and metrics necessary to fully capture protective factors that elicit resilience and optimize human health across the lifespan. Participants will include NIH program staff and resilience researchers from academia, industry, and other Federal agencies.  

Purpose: To critically evaluate measures and metrics of resilience and identify best practices to study and advance the biomedical science of resilience. 

Objectives: 

• To define measures and metrics that best capture resilience within health domains. 
• To discuss methods needed for validating measures of resilience within and across health domains. 
• To consider parameters for determining the quantitative, qualitative, domain- and outcome-specific measures or metrics of resilience that could be included in a database for resilience research. 
• To prepare a summary of the panel discussions and break-out sessions for publication in a peer-review journal and/or to share on the ODS website. 
• To inform priority areas for research funding opportunities at ODS and across NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs). 
• To stimulate new agency-wide collaborations or other partnerships. 

Background: NIH aims to understand the genetic, environmental, and behavioral factors that affect disease risk and progression. To accomplish this, NIH executes and supports research to identify the underlying pathobiology of disease and develop strategies to prevent and treat disease. NIH also supports research that complements the disease-centric model with non-disease or disease-agnostic approaches to optimize health across the lifespan. The biomedical science of resilience is an increasingly relevant area of research that focuses on health optimization.  

More than half of the NIH ICOs have supported programs, studies, or activities related to resilience in recent years. Since 2016, at least five NIH-sponsored forums highlighted the important contributions of resilience research toward advancing the NIH mission. A recurring theme from these forums identified a need for common frameworks to define and measure resilience across biomedical domains. 

A forum hosted by the Trans-NIH Resilience Research Working Group in 2020 took an important first step toward harmonizing the biomedical science of resilience across various health domains at NIH. The forum produced several deliverables to advance the field, including a consensus NIH-wide definition of resilience (resilience encompasses the capacity to resist, adapt to, recover, or grow from a challenge), a resilience concept model, and resilience research design tool. In September 2023, these products were highlighted in a series of peer-reviewed manuscripts published as a supplemental issue in the journal, Stress and Health. The special issue, “Harmonizing the Science of Resilience,” included contributions from 32 authors representing NIH ICOs, the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, and academia. Also, the 2020 forum yielded recommendations to address the critical need to coordinate measures and metrics of resilience within and across health domains.