Accumulation of health deficits frailty index in Wave 1 of the CLSA

In terms of health, older adults are much more likely to develop multiple medical problems and live with chronic diseases, physical disabilities, and cognitive impairments. While each of these individual health deficits will be important to follow as the CLSA participants age, measures that capture overall health will also need to be developed. The problems of old age come as a package. In the field of geriatrics, this phenomenon is known as frailty. Frailty has been defined as a state of increased vulnerability of adverse outcomes and a decreased ability to handle stressors. One of the leading ways to measure frailty is the accumulation of health deficits frailty index (FI). For the proposed study, we plan to build an FI using the CLSA database and use the initial data collected on 50,000 older Canadians to examine frailty levels and correlates across the older Canadian population.