2017 IAGG World Congress on Gerontology and Geriatrics

The 2017 IAGG World Congress on Gerontology and Geriatrics takes place in San Francisco from July 23-27, 2017. I have a poster, entitled "Disentangling Frailty from Disability and Disease: An Empirical Analysis of Frailty Instruments" during the Frailty III session on Wednesday, July 26 from 11:30am-1:30pm. If you are attending, please come by to discuss. Here is part of the abstract for my poster:

"Frailty is conceptualized as an increased vulnerability of older adults to develop adverse health outcomes when encountering a stressor. However, operationalization has proven challenging, with numerous frailty instruments that include a wide range of age-related domains, such as physical capacity, disease, and disability. Inclusion of diseases and disability in frailty instruments obfuscates the frailty construct. Fried (2004) has argued that frailty, disability and comorbidity are interrelated but distinct entities. This distinction is critical for understanding the etiology and consequences of frailty, and for devising prevention and treatment strategies. This review examines the use of different categories of frailty instruments in studies of upstream disease risk factors and of subsequent disability and provides empirical evidence. We have previously shown that 33% (10/30) of studies on risk factors for frailty used a frailty instrument with measures of diseases and/or disability (Buta 2016), but how often this occurs in the broader literature is unknown.

We conducted a literature review to identify articles that examined: a) risk factors (diseases / comorbidity) for frailty; and b) frailty as a risk factor for disability..."