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Jeremy Walston, Frailty Research Moves Beyond Risk Assessment, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Volume 72, Issue 7, July 2017, Pages 915–916, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glx085
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Extract
Frailty in older adults has long been recognized by clinicians and care givers as a warning sign for functional and cognitive decline, chronic illnesses, and mortality. Indeed, frailty is increasingly considered a condition that is a phenotypic and biological platform from which many other Geriatric conditions such as delirium, falls, and disability can emerge (1–3).
Because of its clinical importance to the health and well-being of older adults, investigators have worked diligently to better define its measurement and its biological basis. Since the operationalization of multiple tools to measure frailty took place nearly 20 years ago, a great upsurge in basic and clinical research related to frailty has taken place (4–6). In the earliest phases of this work, risk assessment in population studies predominated, along with adaptations and refinements in measurements strategies. Despite clear evidence that a wide variety of frailty assessments help to identify the older adults most vulnerable to a wide variety of adverse health outcomes, translation of frailty measurements into clinical practice has lagged (7).