Stress, aging, and wound healing

Abstract

Stress appears to promote senescence of immune cells in a manner comparable to chronological aging. This chapter will expand on this by reviewing the human literature on stress and wound healing, and by highlighting the phenomenological and mechanistic similarities of this literature with the findings from aging research. The balance of evidence indicates that it is not aging per se, but aging in the presence of other risk factors that creates a wound healing disparity between younger and older adults. In this context, stress and depression appear to be significant risk factors for impaired healing in aging adults and, by affecting shared biological pathways, may synergistically interact with other prevalent risk factors, such as co-morbidities (e.g., diabetes), pain, malnutrition, physical inactivity, and poor self-care to impair wound healing.