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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Frailty among community-dwelling elderly people in France
— the Three-City Study | | Author(s) | José Alberto Avila-Funes, Catherine Helmer, Hélène Amieva |
| Journal title | Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, vol 63A, no 10, October 2008 |
| Pages | pp 1089-1096 |
| Source | http://www.geron.org |
| Keywords | Health [elderly] ; At risk ; Ill health ; Self care capacity ; Living in the community ; Longitudinal surveys ; France. |
| Annotation | To better understand the contribution of frailty to health-related outcomes in elderly persons, it seems valuable to explore data from cohort studies across the world in an attempt to establish a comprehensive definition. The purpose of this report is to show the characteristics of frailty and observe its prognosis in a large sample of French community-dwelling older people. Data was used from 6078 people aged 65+ participating in the Three-City Study (3C) in Bordeaux, Dijon and Montpelier. Frailty was defined as having at least three of the following criteria: weight loss, weakness, exhaustion, slowness, and low activity. Principal outcomes were incident disability, hospitalisation, and death. Multiple covariates were used to test the predictive validity of frailty on these outcomes. Results showed that 426 individuals (7%) met the frailty criteria. Participants classified as frail were significantly older, more likely to be female, and less educated, and reported more chronic diseases, lower income, and poorer self-reported health status in comparison to non-frail participants. In multivariate analysis, frailty was significantly associated with 4-year incidence of disability in activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental ADL (IADL). However, frailty was marginally associated with incident hospitalisation and was not a statistically significant predictor of incident mobility disability or mortality adjusting for potential confounding factors. Frailty is not specific to a subgroup or region of the world. The construct proposed by Fried and colleagues confirms its predictive validity for adverse-health outcomes, particularly for certain components of disability, thus suggesting that it may be useful in population screening and predicting service needs. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-091214217 A |
| Classmark | CC: CA3: CH: CA: K4: 3J: 765 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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