Mechanisms that Support and Maintain Health

A subject's vulnerability is typically compensated, at least in part, by resilience factors. The term «resilience» is used here as a broader concept than just neurogenesis, encompassing all those intrinsic/endogenous mechanisms that support and maintain health, thereby enabling subjects to cope with stressful situations. In fact, chronic stress can lead to serious health problems and can affect nearly every system of the human body, as suggested by physical, cognitive, affective and behavioral symptoms. For a certain percentage of the general population, chronic stress raises blood pressure, increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, suppresses the immune system, and affects the vulnerability to psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression, or schizophrenia. As no more than 15% of people under chronic stress will develop a psychiatric disorder at some point, the term «resilience» not only suggests a certain mental robustness, but probably also indicates a certain auto-therapeutic capacity. All this is likely to include personality traits supporting or impeding social skills.

Genetic Factors linked to Resilience?

Given the convincing results of our Neural Net derived molecular-genetic model of vulnerability to psychiatric disorders, we also addressed the question of the extent to which the concept of «healthiness» can be quantified in a similar way and might be helpful in strengthening a person's «resilience». To this end, we used the sample of healthy controls (n=267) as the target population while all patients of our study (n=1,431) served as control population. In fact, as was the case with our vulnerability approach, our analysis revealed genotype patterns that exhibited unique characteristics in the healthy target populations when compared to the affected control population. However, unlike in the case of vulnerability, the contribution of each significant gene to discrimination was quite small, so that even with 18 genes that reached significance, no more than 46% of individuals were correctly classified, whereas 54% were labeled as "unknown" (a false-positive rate of "0" was part of the optimization criteria). A further complicating detail was the fact that the sample selection had a much greater influence than was the case with the patients.

This result made it clear that a "positive" definition of «healthiness» is difficult to accomplish, if not impossible, so that its usefulness for investigations into the nature of «resilience» is questionable. The "negative" definition of «healthiness», namely not having certain genotype patterns of the affected patients, does not help in this context either. As an alternative, we would like to draw attention to the results of our studies with more than 3,000 students on coping behavior under chronic stress, which revealed 2 personality traits showing a close link between basic coping behavior and mental health problems, across cultures and ethnicities. The respective scores allow an early detection of psychiatric risk cases, nota bene prior to the development of clinically relevant symptoms. Additionally, there are known rules for such risk cases (some 10% of the general population) that have proven to be very effective in preventing psychiatric disorders: (1) get enough sleep, (2) control consumption behavior, (3) do regular exercises to meet the "Recommendation for Adults" of the American Heart Association as to regular moderate-intensity cardio or aerobic exercise (e.g., going for a walk/hike, riding a bicycle, doing sports).

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