Background: The ageing process is highly heterogeneous leading to diverse ageing trajectories. Such trajectories have been modelled to study trends and determinants of ageing and could potentially be used to inform the planning of rehabilitation services at population level. The objective of this paper was to explore whether healthy ageing trajectories are suitable to identify targets for rehabilitation interventions for the ageing population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To evaluate the measurement structure of the ICOPE screening tool (IST) of intrinsic capacity and to find out whether the IST as a global measure adds explanatory power over and above its domains in isolation to predict the occurrence of adverse health outcomes such as dependence and hospitalization in community-dwelling older people.
Design: Secondary analysis of a cohort study, the Toledo Study of Healthy Ageing.
Setting: Province of Toledo, Spain.
Purpose: Frailty is a reversible multidimensional syndrome that puts older people at a high risk of adverse health outcomes. It has been proposed to emerge from the dysregulation of the complex system dynamics of physiologic control systems. We propose the analysis of the fractal complexity of hand movements as a new method to detect frailty in older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is limited knowledge on the performance of different frailty scales in clinical settings. We sought to evaluate in non-geriatric hospital departments the feasibility, agreement and predictive ability for adverse events after 1 year follow-up of several frailty assessment tools.
Methods: Longitudinal study with 667 older adults recruited from five hospitals in three different countries (Spain, Italy and United Kingdom).
Objectives: We aimed to explore predictors of sustained transitions (those that are maintained for an extra follow-up) between robustness and prefrailty in both directions.
Design: Longitudinal population-based cohort.
Setting And Participants: Community-dwelling Spaniards 65 years or older from the Toledo Study of Healthy Ageing.
Objectives: Sarcopenia and frailty have been shown separately to predict disability and death in old age. Our aim was to determine if sarcopenia may modify the prognosis of frailty regarding both mortality and disability, raising the existence of clinical subtypes of frailty depending on the presence of sarcopenia.
Design: A Spanish longitudinal population-based study.
Background: To compare the performance of eight frailty instruments to identify relevant adverse outcomes for older people across different settings over a 12 month follow-up.
Methods: Observational longitudinal prospective study of people aged 75 + years enrolled in different settings (acute geriatric wards, geriatric clinic, primary care clinics, and nursing homes) across five European cities. Frailty was assessed using the following: Frailty Phenotype, SHARE-FI, 5-item Frailty Trait Scale (FTS-5), 3-item FTS (FTS-3), FRAIL scale, 35-item Frailty Index (FI-35), Gérontopôle Frailty Screening Tool, and Clinical Frailty Scale.
Background: Frailty is associated with a prodromal stage called pre-frailty, a potentially reversible and highly prevalent intermediate state before frailty becomes established. Despite being widely-used in the literature and increasingly in clinical practice, it is poorly understood.
Objective: To establish consensus on the construct and approaches to diagnose and manage pre-frailty.
The European Commission and 22 European Union Member States cofounded the first Joint Action (JA) in frailty: ADVANTAGE. It aimed to build a common framework to push frailty as a public health priority contributing to a homogeneous and evidence-based approach across Europe. This article details how the JA has evolved and its main results, especially in Spain where the Roadmap to Approach Frailty was developed within the Strategy of Health Promotion and Prevention of the National Health System and approved by the Public Health Commission on 14/11/2019.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Study the frequency and determinants of frailty transitions in a community-dwelling older population.
Design: Population-based prospective longitudinal study [The Toledo Study of Healthy Ageing (TSHA)].
Setting And Participants: 1748 community-dwelling individuals aged >65 years living in Toledo, a Spanish province.
Structural and intercultural competence approaches have been widely applied to fields such as medical training, healthcare practice, healthcare policies and health promotion. Nevertheless, their systematic implementation in epidemiological research is absent. Based on a scoping review and a qualitative analysis, in this article we propose a checklist to assess cultural and structural competence in epidemiological research: the Structural and Intercultural Competence for Epidemiological Studies guidelines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Visual impairment (VI) may lead to worsening functional status and disability. Although disability is very difficult to reverse, it is usually preceded by frailty that may be reverted more easily. It is possible that VI is also related to frailty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The World Health Organization's active ageing model is based on the optimisation of four key "pillars": health, lifelong learning, participation and security. It provides older people with a policy framework to develop their potential for well-being, which in turn, may facilitate longevity. We sought to assess the effect of active ageing on longer life expectancy by: i) operationalising the WHO active ageing framework, ii) testing the validity of the factors obtained by analysing the relationships between the pillars, and iii) exploring the impact of active ageing on survival through the health pillar.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of this study was to assess how disease burden caused by chronic conditions is related to mortality (predictive validity) and other health outcomes (convergent validity). This was studied in 625 community-dwelling adults living in Spain aged 65 years and older. Disease burden was measured with the Disease Burden Morbidity Assessment (DBMA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Health professionals commonly use gait speed in the evaluation of functional status in older people. However, only a limited number of studies have assessed gait speed in the absence of disorders of gait, using confounding factors and exclusion criteria coming from studies conducted in younger people. Our study aims to analyse which factors are associated with gait speed in older people with normal clinical gait.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Because of the dynamic nature of frailty, prospective epidemiological data are essential to calibrate an adequate public health response.
Methods: A systematic review of literature on frailty incidence was conducted within the European Joint Action ADVANTAGE.
Results: Of the 6 studies included, only 3 were specifically aimed at estimating frailty incidence, and only 2 provided disaggregated results by at least gender.