The NIH has launched an effort to “advance research on whole-person health and create an integrated knowledge network of healthy physiological function.”
Whole-person health involves “looking at the whole person—not just separate organs or body systems—and considering multiple factors that promote health. For “example, a multicomponent lifestyle intervention including healthy diet, physical activity, and stress management may improve multiple and interconnected aspects of health including cardiovascular (e.g. blood pressure), metabolic (e.g. glucose metabolism), and musculoskeletal function (e.g. muscle strength).”
The five-year initiative will build on the “NIH Human Reference Atlas and the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) to connect the complex anatomy and function of the body’s different organs and systems into a single ‘map.’” Future stages of the project will “link common clinical measures, such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and cholesterol, to major physiological functions. This initiative will also populate the framework with existing human data and ultimately build and test an interactive model of whole-person health.”
Dr. Helene Langevin, who is leading the program, says that this will allow researchers to “explore scientific questions about health in a new way,” laying a foundation for “understanding the factors that drive declines in health and mechanistic pathways to health restoration.”
