Frailty is a common and central problem of old age. Recent research has defined frailty as an accumulation of deficits or as a distinct clinical syndrome involving specific comorbid physical disorders and functional impairment, but the psychological aspects of frailty have received little attention. It is proposed that the onset of frailty is associated with an identity crisis, a psychological ...

BACKGROUND Understanding and addressing the needs of frail persons is an emerging health priority for Nova Scotia and internationally. Primary healthcare (PHC) providers regularly encounter frail persons in their daily clinical work. However, routine identification and measurement of frailty is not standard practice and, in general, there is a lack of awareness about how to identify and respond...

BACKGROUND Frailty has been conceptualized as a wasting disorder with weight loss as a key component. However, obesity is associated with disability and with physiological markers also recently linked with frailty, for example, increased inflammation and low antioxidant capacity. We aimed to explore the relationship between frailty and body mass index (BMI) in older people. METHODS Data were ...

Objectives: The aims of this study were to: (1) determine the prevalence of undernutrition and frailty in hospitalised elderly patients and (2) evaluate the efficacy of both the Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA) screening tool and the MNA short form (MNA-SF) in identifying frailty. Setting and Participants: A convenient sample of 100 consecutive patients (75.0 % female) admitted to the Geriatri...

BACKGROUND Frailty is a clinical phenotype that is associated with adverse health outcomes. Since frail patients may be more prone for adverse drug events and about 15-20 % of commonly prescribed drugs are metabolized by CYP2D6, we hypothesized that CYP2D6 metabolism is decreased in frail patients compared with healthy subjects. METHODS The (13)C-dextromethorphan breath test (DM-BT) was used ...

Recurrent events data have been increasingly important in clinical studies. There are many methods to analyze this type of data. Several papers have been presented about how to perform repeated events analysis in SAS. In clinical studies, we may encounter recurrent disease episodes in patients with a terminal event such as death, and the terminal event is often strongly correlated with the recu...

Frailty is increasingly relevant for clinicians to improve care for vulnerable older adults. Prominent frailty measures include the frailty phenotype and the frailty index. The frailty phenotype is grounded in a theoretical construct hypothesized to have an underlying biological basis. The frailty index describes frailty as a nonspecific age-associated vulnerability, reflected in an accumulatio...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of frailty in a community cohort of patients with heart failure (HF) and to determine whether frailty is associated with healthcare utilization. BACKGROUND Frailty is associated with death in patients with HF, but its prevalence and impact on healthcare utilization in patients with HF are poorly characterized. METHODS Resident...

BACKGROUND Chronic heart failure is a serious medical condition. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in frailty syndrome and self-care levels among patients with cardiovascular conditions. Demonstrating the influence of frailty syndrome on self-care could improve the quality of self-care and prevent the adverse effects of frailty syndrome. The purpose of this study was to assess the...

In this paper, we describe Bayesian modeling of dependent multivariate survival data using positive stable frailty distributions. A flexible baseline hazard formulation using a piecewise exponential model with a correlated prior process is used. The estimation of the stable law parameter together with the parameters of the (conditional) proportional hazards model is facilitated by a modified Gi...