Frailty, a multisystem ageing syndrome

Abstract

Abstract The management of frail older people is a key component of aged care. There has been a plethora of tools developed for the diagnosis and screening of frailty. Some of these tools are entering routine clinical practice at a time when the higher healthcare costs involved in caring for older people who are frail have become a potential target for cost-cutting. Yet there is still only limited evidence to support the widespread adoption of frailty tools, and foundational factors impact on their accuracy and validity. Despite the acceptance of frailty as a valid term in research and clinical practice, older people believe the term carries stigma. Such issues indicate that there may be a need to reconsider current approaches to frailty. Recent advances in the science of ageing biology can provide a new framework for reconfiguring how we screen, diagnose, treat and prevent frailty. Frailty can be considered to be a multisystem ageing syndrome of decreased physiological and functional reserve, where the biological changes of ageing are seen in most tissues and organs and are the pathogenic mechanism for frailty. Likewise age-related chronic disease and multimorbidity are syndromes where ageing changes occur in one or multiple systems, respectively. This model focusses diagnostic criteria for frailty onto the biomarkers of ageing and generates new targets for the prevention and treatment of frailty based on interventions that influence ageing biology.