(Press-News.org) A new paper from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Butler Columbia Aging Center, and Columbia Irving Medical Center introduces a scientific framework for understanding the biological foundation of health—what the researchers term Intrinsic Health. Published in Science Advances, the study lays the groundwork for measuring and promoting health itself, rather than merely treating disease.
Titled “Intrinsic Health as a Foundation for a Science of Health,” the paper defines intrinsic health as a field-like state that supports the body’s ability to maintain internal balance across dynamic biological networks—enabling resilience, performance, and sustainability over time. The authors argue that while medicine has long focused on disease, a robust science of health has remained elusive—until now.
“Understanding the mechanisms that support health—and shifting our focus from late-stage disease treatment to health optimization—was our core objective,” said lead author Alan Cohen, PhD, associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School and a member of the Butler Columbia Aging Center. “By defining, measuring, and targeting intrinsic health, we move closer to realizing the ultimate aim of health science: helping individuals and populations thrive across the lifespan.”
According to the researchers, intrinsic health arises from the interaction of three essential biological components:
Energy: The fundamental requirement for life, supporting the function of cells and organs.
Communication: The system’s ability to acquire and transmit information, enabling adaptation and coordination.
Structure: The physical framework in which energy and communication support biological function and adaptation.
These components, shaped by billions of years of natural selection, collectively produce health as an emergent, measurable property. Intrinsic health, the researchers note, is quantifiable and tends to decline with age—making it a vital focus for aging research and preventive medicine.
“This is part of a broader scientific and cultural revolution,” said co-author Martin Picard, PhD, associate professor in the Butler Aging Center and Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology at Columbia Irving Medical Center. “We’re moving away from viewing the body as a molecular machine and toward an understanding of the body as an energetic process—life itself, and our health, as fundamentally energetic processes.”
The authors emphasize that the ability to measure intrinsic health could catalyze transformative advances:
Test lifestyle and technological interventions for direct impact on health
Enable individuals to track and optimize their own health
Shift medicine from reactive treatment to proactive health maintenance
“Measuring health itself will allow public health and medicine to focus on building, maintaining, and restoring health—not just preventing and treating disease,” said Cohen.
“With a clear biological target, public health and health care can become increasingly proactive and preventive,” noted senior author Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, Dean of the Mailman School and Director of the Butler Columbia Aging Center. “This new framework could guide population health improvements, inform policy, and establish metrics to track effectiveness scientifically and systematically.”
Co-authors are John Beard, Dan W. Belsky, Columbia Mailman School and Butler Aging Center; Julie Herbstman, Christine Kuryla, Molei Liu, Nour Makarem, Daniel Malinsky, Sen Pei, and Ying Wei, Columbia Mailman School.
The Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Bringing together the campus-wide resources of a top-tier research university, the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center approach to aging science is an innovative, multidisciplinary one with an eye to practical and policy implications. Its mission is to add to the knowledge base needed to better understand the aging process and the societal implications of our increased potential for living longer lives. For more information about this center which is based at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, please visit: aging.columbia.edu.
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master’s and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit www.mailman.columbia.edu.
END
New research proposes framework to define and measure the biology of health
2025-06-18
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Earliest evidence of humans in the Americas confirmed in new U of A study
2025-06-18
Vance Holliday jumped at the invitation to go do geology at New Mexico's White Sands. The landscape, just west of Alamogordo, looks surreal – endless, rolling dunes of fine beige gypsum, left behind by ancient seas. It's one of the most unique geologic features in the world.
But a national park protects much of the area's natural resources, and the U.S. Army uses an adjacent swath as a missile range, making research at White Sands impossible much of the time. So it was an easy call for Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist and geologist, to accept an invitation in 2012 ...
Tracking microbial rhythms reveals new target for treating metabolic diseases
2025-06-18
The gut microbiome, a vast assortment of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit our digestive system, plays a critical role in converting food into energy. Many of these microbes follow rhythmic cycles of activity throughout the day. However, high-fat diets and other factors can disrupt these rhythms and contribute to metabolic disease.
A new study by researchers at University of California San Diego and their colleagues used time-restricted feeding (TRF), an intervention that limits dietary intake to a short time window each day, to restore microbial rhythms in mice fed a high-fat diet. By analyzing ...
Funding for Public Health Law teaching announced
2025-06-18
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health is pleased to announce funding awards to support the teaching of Public Health Law at U.S. schools of public health. Part of a CDC-funded initiative designed to improve capacity for local health departments and increase knowledge of law among the next cadre of public health graduates, the “Teaching Public Health Law in Accredited Schools and Programs of Public Health” project is led by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health Faculty Magda Schaler-Haynes, JD, MPH, and Heather Krasna, PhD. The project is housed within The Center for Public Health Systems in ...
Addictive use of social media, not total time, associated with youth mental health
2025-06-18
NEW YORK, NY (June 18, 2025)--Addictive use of social media, video games, or mobile phones—but not total screen time—is associated with worse mental health among preteens, a new study by researchers at Columbia and Cornell universities has found.
The study, published June 18 in JAMA, examined the social media use of nearly 4,300 children, starting at age 8, and how use changed over the next four years.
Addictive use of screens—excessive use that interfered with schoolwork, home responsibilities, or other activities—was ...
Hey Doc, you got something for snails?
2025-06-18
Kyoto, Japan -- Sea cucumbers spend their lives prowling the ocean floor, scavenging for food and generally minding their own business. We can see snails leading similar lives, slimy but not bothering anyone.
Yet some species of tiny sea snails are a bother: they are common parasites of sea cucumbers. Extensive taxonomic research has been conducted on these host-parasite interactions in Japan, where sea cucumbers are a seafood delicacy -- for humans.
Despite these previous studies, however, local species richness still contains some unknowns. Parasites of the sea cucumber species Holothuria atra have been thoroughly investigated, but those of Holothuria leucospilota have not. This is ...
Social factors may determine how human-like we think animals are
2025-06-18
From depressed polar bears to charismatic pandas, conservationists have used anthropomorphism, or the practice of attributing human qualities to non-human subjects, to garner public support for conservation efforts. In a new study publishing June 18 in the Cell Press journal iScience, scientists tease apart some of the social factors that influence whether people view animals similarly to humans. The researchers found that factors such as social integration, urban living, formal education, and religion can affect an individual’s tendency to assign human characteristics to animals. This in turn may affect their willingness to engage with conservation ...
Climate change cuts global crop yields, even when farmers adapt
2025-06-18
In brief:
New research offers the most comprehensive look yet at how global crop yields are likely to change as the planet warms.
After adjusting for how real farmers adapt, researchers estimate global yields of calories from staple crops in a high-emissions future will be 24% lower in 2100 than they would be without climate change.
U.S. agriculture and other breadbaskets are among the hardest-hit in the study’s projections, while regions in Canada, China, and Russia may benefit.
The global food system faces growing risks from climate change, even as farmers ...
Message in a bubble: using physics to encode messages in ice
2025-06-18
Inspired by naturally occurring air bubbles in glaciers, researchers have developed a method to encode messages in ice. Publishing June 18 in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the paper explains how the team encoded frozen messages in binary and Morse code by manipulating the size and distribution of bubbles in ice. The method could be used to store short messages in very cold regions such as Antarctica and the Arctic, where conventional information storage is difficult or prohibitively expensive.
“In naturally cold regions, the use of trapped air bubbles as a means of message delivery and storage uses less energy than ...
Before dispersing out of Africa, humans learned to thrive in diverse habitats
2025-06-18
Today, all non-Africans are known to have descended from a small group of people that ventured into Eurasia after around 50 thousand years ago. However, fossil evidence shows that there were numerous failed dispersals before this time that left no detectable traces in living people.
In a paper published in Nature this week, new evidence for the first time explains why those earlier migrations didn’t succeed. A consortium of scientists led by Prof. Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and Prof. Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge has found that before expanding into Eurasia 50 ...
Addictive screen use trajectories and suicidal behaviors, suicidal ideation, and mental health in US youths
2025-06-18
About The Study: This study identified distinct trajectories of addictive use of social media, mobile phones, and video games from childhood to early adolescence and found links to suicidal behaviors, suicidal ideation, and worse mental health outcomes. High or increasing addictive use trajectories were common. Addictive screen use trajectories warrant further study regarding potential use for clinical evaluation of risk and for the design and testing of interventions to improve youth mental health.
Corresponding ...