A Simple Questionnaire as a First-Step Tool to Detect Specific Frailty Profiles: The Lorraine Frailty-Profiling Screening Scale.

Objectives: To propose a simple frailty screening tool able to identify frailty profiles.

Design: Cross-sectional observational study.

Setting: Participants were recruited in 3 different clinical settings: a primary care outpatient clinic (RURAL population, N=591), a geriatric day clinic (DAY-CLINIC population, N=76) and healthy volunteers (URBAN population, N=147).

On the role of knee joint in balance control and postural strategies: effects of total knee replacement in elderly subjects with knee osteoarthritis.

This study aimed to evaluate the role of the knee joint in the neurosensory organization of balance control and the generation of postural sensorimotor strategies. Ten patients, aged over 60 years and having undergone unilateral total knee replacement (TKR) for osteoarthritis, and 20 controls were submitted to static and dynamic posturographic tests and to a sensory organization test (SOT) aiming at evaluating postural control in quiet stance and during movement. The patients were submitted to these evaluations after the disappearance of pain (TKR(1)) and at the end of a 6-week rehabilitation program (TKR(2)).

A simple clinical scale to stratify risk of recurrent falls in community-dwelling adults aged 65 years and older.

Background: Correct identification of people at risk for recurrent falls facilitates the establishment of preventive and rehabilitative strategies in older adults.

Objective: The purposes of this study were: (1) to develop and validate a simple clinical scale to stratify risk for recurrent falls in community-dwelling elderly people based on easily obtained social and clinical items and (2) to evaluate the added value of 3 clinical balance tests in predicting this risk.

Design: This was a prospective measurement study.

Age-related part taken by attentional cognitive processes in standing postural control in a dual-task context.

The aim of this work was to determine the effects of ageing on the possible mobilisation of cognitive processes in orthostatic postural balance. Seventy-nine individuals of three different age groups were placed in dual-task situations that combined standing postural control with three different cognitive tasks. Two of these three tasks, auditory-verbal and visual-verbal ones, required external information acquisition whereas the third, a mental counting task, did not require such information.