Abstract
In geriatric practice, primary care physicians or geriatricians need to consider not only diseases but also age-dependent impairment in their physical and mental functions to keep their health. This is obvious because frailty, which is difficult to be understood by disease-based concept, occupies large part of the cause of dependency in the old-old population. Therefore, the Japan Geriatric Society proposed a new expression of frailty as “Frail” in Japanese, and advocated that appropriate prevention of “Frail” is important to postpone the process toward disability.
There are two representative models to capture frailty, such as the accumulated deficit model by Rockwood et al. and the phenotype model by Fried et al. The previous studies indicated that both models could predict the incident adverse health outcomes. These studies support that frailty is an important concept in geriatric medicine. However, frailty assessment is not unified yet, therefore a lot of screening tools and assessments of frailty do exist at present.
The important preventive measures are to support an intake of balanced foods and regular exercises in daily lives for frail older adults. Recently, a higher protein-intake is recommended for older adults to keep their muscle mass in the nutrition field. In terms of physical exercise, resistance training is thought to be beneficial for preventing muscle weakness but the acquiring the habit of regular exercise may be more important for frail seniors.
Frailty has been the center of geriatrics because it could be an effective concept for identifying the pre-disability state with reversibility which may be the best for preventive intervention. The concept of frailty is thought to be necessary for the healthy longevity.
