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Alice E. Kane, Susan E. Howlett, Advances in Preclinical Models of Frailty, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Volume 72, Issue 7, July 2017, Pages 867–869, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glx072
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Extract
The concept of frailty was proposed in 1979 to capture heterogeneity in the health status and mortality risk of people of the same chronological age (1). Clinically, frailty is generally considered a state of increased vulnerability to adverse health outcomes, although there is some controversy about the best way to assess it (2). The two most commonly used tools to quantify frailty in a clinical setting are the “frailty index” approach (3), and the “frailty phenotype” approach (4). A frailty index measures the number of health-related deficits a person has accumulated over their lifetime. The number of deficits present is divided by the number of deficits measured, to give a frailty index score between 0 and 1. The frailty phenotype determines if a person is frail based on poor performance in five functional criteria (weight loss, exhaustion, weakness, slowness, lack of activity). If a person has poor performance on one or two of these criteria they are considered pre-frail, and if they have poor performance on three or more they are considered frail. Frailty is an important clinical challenge, as the population ages and the number of frail individuals in the health care system rises.
