Clinical Uses and Alternative Approaches of Frailty Determination

Frailty represents poor response to stressors that increases susceptibility to adverse events, including disability, loss of independence, and death – and is prevalent during aging, affecting as many as 50% of those 85 years of age and older. Efforts to characterize and quantify frail states took a substantial leap forward with physical frailty and deficit accumulation-based frailty assessment tools that emerged in the early 2000’s. Since that time, Frailty tools have been correlated to important health outcomes, including mortality, been used to evaluate therapeutic benefit, and explore the underlying biology of frailty. Importantly, frailty tools have also found utility in predicting outcomes for medical treatments, particularly invasive surgery, and continue to evolve to improve health outcomes in older individuals.

Frailty assessment tools are emerging for use in predicting patient response to treatment – but the full range of possible applications has not been sufficiently examined. Therefore, one goal of this research topic is to further explore clinical use of frailty assessment tools in predicting health outcomes following intervention, including response to specific surgeries, cancer therapy, medications, etc. Furthermore, traditional frailty tools may be too time encumbering for clinical utility. A second important goal for this Research Topic is to explore alternatives to frailty assessment. Manuscripts addressing this goal may explore specific assessments that correlate to frailty assessment tools and/or related outcomes, as well as novel frailty assessment tools that can be rapidly administered.

This Research Topic welcomes review papers and original research on the following themes:

• Examinations of frailty assessments and correlation with response to clinical interventions, including surgical or pharmacologic therapies.
• Novel strategies that rapidly assess frailty
• Correlation of single frailty parameters or rapid frailty assessment tools with traditional frailty assessment tools or frailty related outcomes.
• Studies that explore alternatives to frailty assessment, but can provide rapid evaluations that predict frailty related outcomes will be considered.
• Examination of association of traditional frailty assessment tools with standard outcomes (lifespan, health span, co-morbidities, including COVID-19) is outside the scope of this Research Topic.

Topic Editor John Batsis owns equity of SynchroHealth, LLC. Topic Editor Kenneth L Seldeen declares no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.