Integrative Reserve and Integrative Medicine

Abstract

If a person has a bigger face, is he or she less prone to suffer from cognitive disorders than a person with a smaller face? Is this possible? If someone has a higher education and higher income, are they less likely to suffer from cognitive disorders than others. Is this possible, too? The answer to both questions is: yes, it is possible [1, 2] .We can observe many cases around us in which a very heavy smoker does not get lung cancer even though he or she may have had chronic lung injury for a long time. On the other hand, someone may only smoke a little or once in a while but may get lung cancer. People of the same family and nationality, in the same environment, eating the same food and even of the same age and with the same habits often have different disease morbidities. What is the reason?The ability to resist morbidity is termed integrative reserve. For example, two people can have the same degree of Alzheimer’s disease pathology, but one can appear much more demented than the other. The idea behind cognitive reserve is that the brain actively attempts to compensate for pathology. Some people are able to compensate better, for example, by using more efficient brain networks or alternate networks, and may be able to function normally despite the pathology. People with more neurons might be able to lose more of them before showing a clinical deficit [3] .Integrative reserve is not resistibility and immunity, it is reserve ability or capacity. Nation-ality, gender, area, smoking, lifestyle, vascular risk factors, aging, physical activity, weight, income and even education level might be reserve factors of disease morbidities. If something can influence the reserve ability, it can be considered a reserve factor. If our body is infected or injured by pathogenic factors, pathological changes will occur, but sometimes we do not become ill immediately. With the development of pathogenic factors, differences in reserve ability decide whether we will suffer from these diseases or not. Based on many reserve factors, we have different morbidity thresholds, and the buffering capacity is the integrative reserve.Other systems, not only cognitive disorders, also have a reserve, and our body has many types of reserves. Heart failure reserve has been studied in heart rate variability research; if a subject has a 1/f-type temporal scaling heart rate, he or she has a stronger reserve to delay