Intrinsic capacity

Health Management Glossary

Public Health & Health Promotion

Definition. Intrinsic capacity is the composite of all the physical and mental capacities that a person can draw on at a given point in time; together with the environment and the interaction between the two, it determines functional ability in older age.

Explanation

The concept was introduced by the World Health Organization in its World report on ageing and health, which redefined healthy ageing as the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age (World Health Organization, 2015; Beard et al., 2016). It moves the focus of care for older people from counting diseases to protecting function. Using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health as background, Cesari et al. (2018) identified five domains that capture it: locomotion, vitality, cognition, psychological capacity and sensory capacity.

Because two people with the same diagnoses can differ greatly in what they are able to do, intrinsic capacity is used as an outcome, a screening target and a predictor. The healthy longevity chapter on this site reviews studies in which it predicts mortality and disability-free survival, and the article on compression of morbidity uses it to explain why diagnoses can rise while function improves. It should not be confused with frailty, which describes depleted reserve, nor with functional ability, which also depends on the environment.

Related concepts

Frailty Healthy life expectancy Compression of morbidity Multimorbidity

Read on The Health Topics

• Healthy Longevity: An Introduction (101)
• Living Longer, but Healthier? Compression of Morbidity and the Case of Türkiye

References

Beard, J. R., Officer, A., de Carvalho, I. A., Sadana, R., Pot, A. M., Michel, J.-P., Lloyd-Sherlock, P., Epping-Jordan, J. E., Peeters, G. M. E. E., Mahanani, W. R., Thiyagarajan, J. A., & Chatterji, S. (2016). The World report on ageing and health: A policy framework for healthy ageing. The Lancet, 387(10033), 2145–2154. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00516-4

Cesari, M., Araujo de Carvalho, I., Amuthavalli Thiyagarajan, J., Cooper, C., Martin, F. C., Reginster, J.-Y., Vellas, B., & Beard, J. R. (2018). Evidence for the domains supporting the construct of intrinsic capacity. The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 73(12), 1653–1660. https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/gly011

World Health Organization. (2015). World report on ageing and health. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565042

Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Intrinsic capacity. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/intrinsic-capacity/

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