Publications by authors named "J Walston"

Resilience to stressors has emerged as a major gerontological concept aiming to promote more positive outcomes for older adults. Achieving this aim relies on determining mechanisms underlying capacity to respond resiliently. This paper seeks proof of principle for the hypothesis that physical aspects of said capacity are rooted in the fitness of one's physiology governing stress response, conceptualized as a dynamical system.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Available evidence supports the importance of inflammation in atrial fibrillation (AF) pathogenesis, yet general anti-inflammatory therapies have failed to show benefit for prevention of the arrhythmia. Better understanding of the specific inflammatory pathways involved is necessary to advance therapeutics.

Methods And Results: We evaluated 9 circulating markers of inflammation measured by immunoassays and incidence of AF in a population-based older cohort.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Frailty is a syndrome that can inform clinical treatments and interventions for older adults. Although implementation of frailty across medical subspecialties has the potential to improve care for the aging population, its uptake has been heterogenous. While frailty assessment is highly integrated into certain medical subspecialties, other subspecialties have only recently begun to consider frailty in the context of patient care.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Although the pathogenesis of delirium is poorly understood, increasing evidence supports a role for inflammation. Previously, individual inflammatory biomarkers have been associated with delirium. Aggregating biomarkers into an index may provide more information than individual biomarkers in predicting certain health outcomes (eg, mortality); however, inflammatory indices have not yet been examined in delirium.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The "Stress Tests and Biomarkers of Resilience" conference, hosted by the American Geriatrics Society and the National Institute on Aging, marks the second in a series aimed at advancing the field of resilience science. Held on March 4-5, 2024, in Bethesda, Maryland, this conference built upon the foundational work from the first conference, which focused on defining resilience across various domains-physical, cognitive, and psychosocial. This year's gathering centered around three factors: the biology that underlies resilient outcomes; the social, environmental, genetic, and psychosocial factors that impact that resilience biology; and the biomarker testing and imaging that predicts resilient outcomes for older adults.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF