BACKGROUND The relationship between frailty and gait characteristics other than velocity has received little attention. Gait variability quantifies the automaticity of gait with greater variability usually indicating an irregular and unstable gait. High gait variability reflects the loss of gait regulation and predicts mobility decline and falls, which may reveal systemic vulnerability. Thus, w...

BACKGROUND Frailty is an important risk factor for adverse outcomes in older people. Substantial variation in frailty prevalence between socioeconomic groups exists, but longitudinal evidence for the association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and frailty is scarce. OBJECTIVE To investigate the course of socioeconomic inequalities in frailty among older adults during 10 years of follow-u...

Dietary pattern analysis is an emerging approach to investigate the association between diet and frailty. This study examined the association of dietary patterns with frailty in 2724 Chinese community-dwelling men and women aged > 65 years. Baseline dietary data were collected using a food frequency questionnaire between 2001 and 2003. Adherence to a priori dietary patterns, including the Diet ...

Introduction: Frailty is a common geriatric syndrome. Studies of frailty and old age have been able to help reduce its underlying causes and complication. Understanding the frailty and its associated factors in developing countries such as Iran, can help gather information on conditions of the elderly and better plan for this age population. Therefore, the present study was implemented to inves...

Recurrent event time data are common in biomedical follow-up studies, in which a study subject may experience repeated occurrences of an event of interest. In this paper, we evaluate two popular nonparametric tests for recurrent event time data in terms of their relative efficiency. One is the log-rank test for classical survival data and the other a more recently developed nonparametric test b...

In the standard frailty model the hazard function i s taken to be proportional to an unobserved random effect, specific to the individual. These frailties are the n taken to be independent realisations from a proba bility distribution of assumed form, and they are integrat ed out to form the likelihood function for the obse rved failure time data. In real applications the assumed istrib ution f...

The frailty model, an extension of the proportional hazards model, is often used to model clustered survival data. However, some extension of the ordinary frailty model is required when there exist competing risks within a cluster. Under competing risks, the underlying processes affecting the events of interest and competing events could be different but correlated. In this paper, the hierarchi...

We investigate the effect of unobserved heterogeneity in the context of the linear transformation model for censored survival data in the clinical trials setting. The unobserved heterogeneity is represented by a frailty term, with unknown distribution, in the linear transformation model. The bias of the estimate under the assumption of no unobserved heterogeneity when it truly is present is obt...

AIM To characterize elderly medical patients and identify factors associated with prolonged length of stay. METHODS The present prospective observational study evaluated consecutive patients aged ≥65 years admitted in acute geriatric and medical wards. A comprehensive assessment including demographic, clinical, functional and cognitive variables was carried out. Delayed discharge was defined ...