What is hormesis and its relevance to healthy aging and longevity?
This paper provides a broad overview of hormesis, a specific type of biphasic dose response, its historical and scientific foundations as well as its biomedical applications, especially with respect to aging. Hormesis is a fundamental component of adaptability, neutralizing many endogenous and environmental challenges by toxic agents, thereby enhancing survival. Hormesis is highly conserved, broadly generalizable, and pleiotrophic, being independent of biological model, endpoint measured, inducing agent, level of biological organization and mechanism. The low dose stimulatory hormetic response has specific characteristics which defines both the quantitative features of biological plasticity and the potential for maximum biological performance, thereby estimating the limits to which numerous medical and pharmacological interventions may affect humans. The substantial degrading of some hormetic processes in the aged may profoundly reduce the capacity to respond effectively to numerous environmental/ischemic and other stressors leading to compromised health, disease and, ultimately, defining the bounds of longevity.
Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Morrill I, N344, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA. edwardc@schoolph.umass.edu.
Edward J
EJ
Calabrese
Environmental Health and Safety, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA. gdhawan@ehs.umass.edu.
Gaurav
G
Dhawan
Saint Barnabas Medical Center, 94 Old Short Hills Road, Livingston, NJ, 07039, USA. rakapoor@barnabashealth.org.
Rachna
R
Kapoor
Section of Occupational Medicine, Institute of Public Health, Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Largo Francesco Vito 1, 00168, Rome, Italy. iavicoli.ivo@rm.unicatt.it.
Ivo
I
Iavicoli
Department of Biomedical & Biotechnological Sciences; School of Medicine, University of Catania, Viale Andrea Doria/6, 95125, Catania, Italy. calabres@unict.it.
Vittorio
V
Calabrese
D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D059165:Hormesis / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D019194:Ischemic Preconditioning; D008136:Longevity / Q000502:physiology*
Adaptive response; Aging; Biphasic; Dose–response; Hormesis; Preconditioning