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. 2017 Oct;65(10):2134-2139.
doi: 10.1111/jgs.14902. Epub 2017 Apr 19.

Integrating Frailty Research into the Medical Specialties-Report from a U13 Conference

Jeremy Walston  1 , Thomas N Robinson  2 , Susan Zieman  3 , Frances McFarland  4 , Christopher R Carpenter  5 , Keri N Althoff  6 , Melissa K Andrew  7 , Caroline S Blaum  8 , Patrick J Brown  9   10 , Brian Buta  11 , E Wesley Ely  12 , Luigi Ferrucci  3 , Kevin P High  13 , Stephen B Kritchevsky  14 , Kenneth Rockwood  7 , Kenneth E Schmader  15   16 , Felipe Sierra  17 , Kaycee M Sink  14 , Ravi Varadhan  18 , Arti Hurria  19
Affiliations

Integrating Frailty Research into the Medical Specialties-Report from a U13 Conference

Jeremy Walston et al. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2017 Oct.

Abstract

Although the field of frailty research has expanded rapidly, it is still a nascent concept within the clinical specialties. Frailty, conceptualized as greater vulnerability to stressors because of significant depletion of physiological reserves, predicts poorer outcomes in several medical specialties, including cardiology, human immunodeficiency virus care, and nephrology, and in the behavioral and social sciences. Lack of a consensus definition, proliferation of measurement tools, inadequate understanding of the biology of frailty, and lack of validated clinical algorithms for frail individuals hinders incorporation of frailty assessment and frailty research into the specialties. In 2015, the American Geriatrics Society, the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine held a conference for awardees of the NIA-sponsored Grants for Early Medical/Surgical Specialists Transition into Aging Research program to review the current state of knowledge regarding frailty in the subspecialties and to highlight examples of integrating frailty research into the medical specialties. Research questions to advance frailty research into specialty medicine are proposed.

Keywords: biologic mechanisms; clinical manifestations; frailty; measurement; medical specialties.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interests and Disclosures

*Authors can be listed by abbreviations of their names

For all “Yes” responses provide a brief explanation here:

1. AH is funded by the NIH (U13 AG048721, R01 AG037037, R01 CA172119, R25 CA183723), the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the UniHealth Foundation, and the Hearst Foundation. AH serves as a consultant for Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Carevive, Sanofi, Pierian Biosciences and GTx, Inc. AH serves as a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Board of Directors and International Society of Geriatric Oncology Board.

2. CRC serves as co-PI of the U13 award supporting GEMSSTAR conference, serving as co-organizer. He is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal Academic Emergency Medicine and Editorial Board Member of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. He is also faculty for the Continuing Medical Education product Emergency Medical Abstracts.

3. KNA received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health (K01 AI093197) and has served as a medical advisory board member for Gilead Sciences, Inc.

4. MKA has grant funding in the form of collaborative research agreements from GSK and Pfizer (with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Public Health Agency of Canada), and from Sanofi Pasteur (with the Canadian Frailty Network). She occasionally provides clinical linguistic consulting services to ICON language services.

5. BB is funded by the Johns Hopkins University Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, National Institute on Aging, NIA P30AG021334.

6. EWE is funded by the NIA and VA. He also receives honoraria from Orion, Pfizer, and Abbott.

7. KPH receives royalties from McGraw–Hill as the Associate Editor of Hazzard’s Geriatric Medicine textbook.

8. KR receives grant funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He also received honoraria from Nutricia for attending an ad board meeting in 2015, as well as spoke in a speaker forum for Nutricia in 2015. He is the founder of DGI Clinical, which does outcome measurement & data analytics for pharmaceutical companies. He also receives royalties that are assigned to Dalhousie University.

9. KES was also supported by NIA P30 AG028716.

10. FS is involved in grants management at NIH, and was a speaker at the speaker forum for the U13 conference.

11. KMS receives grant funding from NIH and as a site PI of industry sponsored trials by Biogen, vTv Therapeutics, Lilly, Toyama, and Navidea Biopharmaceuticals.

12. RV receives grant funding from Johns Hopkins University Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, National Institute on Aging, NIA P30AG021334.

References

    1. National Institute on Aging. Grants for Early Medical/Surgical Specialists’ Transition for Aging Research (GEMSSTAR) 2016
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    1. Bandeen-Roche K, Seplaki CL, Huang J, et al. Frailty in Older Adults: A Nationally Representative Profile in the United States. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2015;70:1427–34. - PMC - PubMed
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    1. Bandeen-Roche K, Xue QL, Ferrucci L, et al. Phenotype of frailty: characterization in the women’s health and aging studies. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2006;61:262–6. - PubMed

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