Published in:
01-06-2016 | Editorial
Frailty and polypharmacy
Authors:
Y. Rolland, John E. Morley
Published in:
The journal of nutrition, health & aging
|
Issue 6/2016
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Excerpt
Frailty is now recognized as a major risk factor for future disability and mortality (
1-
3). The physical frailty phenotype as originally defined by Fried et al (
4) has been simplified to be rapidly detected using either the FRAIL screen (
5-
7) or the Gerontopole Screening Questionnaire (
8,
9). The FRAIL scale has been shown to have equivalent predictive ability to other more complex frailty scales (
10,
11). Polypharmacy related to the increase in illnesses in older persons has been identified as one of the treatable components of the FRAIL scale (
12). An alternative approach to defining frailty has been proposed by Rockwood (
13). This scale consists of adding up all the deficits a person has and presenting the result as a percentage of all deficits measured. In actuality, this represents a co-morbidity index. Other frailty scales such as the Tilburg Frailty Indicator (
14,
15) and the Groningen Frailty Index (
16,
17) include both physical and psychosocial elements. Recently, a number of studies have suggested that the presence of a cognitive deficit leads to worse outcomes in persons with a physical frailty deficit (
18-
20). …
