Older cancer patients are a highly heterogeneous population in terms of global health and physiological reserves, and it is often difficult to determine the best treatment. Moreover, clinical tools currently used to assess global health require dedicated time and lack a standardized end score. Circulating markers of biological age and/or fitness could complement or partially substitute the exis...

BACKGROUND Over the years, a plethora of frailty assessment tools has been developed. These instruments can be basically grouped into two types of conceptualizations - unidimensional, based on the physical-biological dimension - and multidimensional, based on the connections among the physical, psychological, and social domains. At present, studies on the comparison between uni- and multidimens...

BACKGROUND There is increasing demand for formal government funded home help services to support community-dwelling older people in Ireland, yet limited information exists on the health profiles of this group, especially regarding frailty. Our aim was to profile a large cohort of adults in receipt of low level home help and to determine the prevalence of frailty. METHODS A total 1312 older ad...

A Poisson-gamma model is introduced to account for between-subjects heterogeneity and within-subjects serial correlation occurring in longitudinal count data. The model extends the usual time-constant shared frailty approach to allow time-varying serially correlated gamma frailty whilst retaining standard marginal assumptions. A composite likelihood approach to estimation and testing for serial...

The multivariate survival distributions are used for description of dependent failure times (life spans) (Clayton and Cuzik 1985; Hougaard 1995, Yashin et al. 1995). The convenient representation of such distributions involves semi-parametric (copula) structure of multivariate survival function. Such structure is important in applications where the cause for dependence between life spans is the...

OBJECTIVES Assessment of perioperative risk of elderly patients in cardiac surgery is difficult, and most of the common risk scores show over- or underestimation. Two frailty scores, the comprehensive assessment of frailty (CAF) score and the Frailty predicts death One yeaR after CArdiac Surgery Test (FORECAST), were developed as additional tools to estimate the preoperative mortality risk, tak...

Abstract Background Sarcopenia is increasingly recognised to impact the quality of life and patient outcomes. The relationship with brain frailty unknown. Objectives Assess if muscle mass at C3 correlates L3 on routine trauma imaging. for associations between muscle-mass, brain-frailty, Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) Method Routine trauma-series CT scans were retrospectively analysed patients age...

The importance of some recognized risk factors on genetic influences for coronary heart disease (CHD) needs further clarification. The aim of the present study was therefore to study the impact of known risk factors on genetic influences for CHD-death. Both twin (correlated gamma-frailty) and non-twin models (univariate gamma-frailty) were utilized and compared regarding their suitability for g...