Year:
Applicant:
Institution:
Email:
griffith@mcmaster.ca
Project ID:
161007
Approved Project Status:
Project Summary
Frailty, especially at its earlier stages, may represent a period of transition from healthy aging to dependency that could be a target for interventions directed at restoring robustness and delaying decline. Although frailty is more commonly found in the oldest old, evidence suggests that frailty is associated with higher mortality and health service use across all ages. Furthermore, at younger ages research suggests that recovery from frailty to healthier states is more common, underscoring the importance of identifying frailty across all ages to improve population health. This study will allow us to better understand how the change in frailty varies across Canada. We will identify subgroups of people with a greater degree of change in frailty and how frailty and the change in frailty is related to use of the health-care system. This project will help us address the policy-relevant question of “why are some people more frail and others not?”
Project Findings
Frailty is a medical condition of reduced function and health in older individuals which increases with age. There are treatments that have been used to delay frailty worsening, but they have been shown to work best at the early stages of frailty. Understanding why some people are frail while others are not can help us to tailor the treatments and has public health importance. Our study was undertaken to better understand how frailty varies across Canada. We used a “frailty index,” which sums the number of health-related conditions or “deficits” a person has. We identified subgroups of people based on social factors, like income and education, and compared them with respect to frailty level and how frailty was related to health-care use.
We found that frailty was higher in people with lower incomes and lower education. Our results suggest that especially in the younger age groups, psychological/cognitive deficits, like depression or memory, are most related to overall frailty levels and how frailty levels differ by income. We also found that health-care use was also related to frailty, but for most types of use (emergency department, hospital, home care), the relationship was strongest for those with the lowest levels of income. Overall, our results suggest that the level of frailty and impact of frailty on health care is greater for people with lower levels of income.
