BACKGROUND Frail older adults are heavy users of health and social care. In order to reduce the costs associated with frailty in older age groups, safe and cost-effective strategies are required that will reduce the incidence and severity of frailty. OBJECTIVE We investigated whether self-reported intensity of physical activity (sedentary, mild, moderate or vigorous) performed at least once a...

Evolving definitions of frailty, and improved understanding of molecular and physiological declines in multiple systems that may increase vulnerability in frail, older adults has encouraged investigators from many disciplines to contribute to this emerging field of research. This article reports on the results of the 2004 American Geriatrics Society/National Institute on Aging conference on a R...

Introduction Frailty and muscle wasting, a component of frailty, are common in advanced stage chronic kidney disease (CKD). Whether frailty is associated with low urinary creatinine excretion (UCrE) as a measure of muscle mass in this population is unknown. Furthermore, reference values of UCrE are lacking. We first defined low UCrE and studied correlates of low UCrE, and subsequently studied c...

Survival analyses are greatly used in medical research especially frailty models which are mostly used to account for heterogeneity in time-to-event. Over the years treatment of cancer has progressed with some patients being cured from different type of cancer. Survival analysis is more focused on subjects that are less at risk of recurrences, metastasis or death after the first treatment as th...

BACKGROUND Gender, social conditions, and health throughout the life course affect functional health in later life. This article addresses two specific hypotheses: i) life-course social and health conditions are associated with frailty; and ii) differential exposure and/or vulnerability of women and men to life-course conditions may account for gender differences in frailty. METHODS Data orig...

BACKGROUND The frailty syndrome is as a well-established condition of risk for disability. Aim of the study is to explore whether a physical activity (PA) intervention can reduce prevalence and severity of frailty in a community-dwelling elders at risk of disability. METHODS Exploratory analyses from the Lifestyle Interventions and Independence for Elders pilot, a randomized controlled trial ...

OBJECTIVES Population ageing may result in increased comorbidity, functional dependence and poor quality of life. Mechanisms and pathophysiology underlying frailty have not been fully elucidated, thus absolute consensus on an operational definition for frailty is lacking. Frailty scores in the acute medical care setting have poor predictive power for clinically relevant outcomes. We explore the...

A very general mechanism for penalized regression has been added to the coxph function in S Plus A user written S Plus function can be supplied that gives addi tional term s to the partial likelihood along with the rst and second derivatives of those terms The variance and degrees of freedom for the extended model are then computed as outlined in Gray Several other arguments control optional as...

In all sorts of regression problems it has become more and more important to deal with high dimensional data with lots of potentially influential covariates. A possible solution is to apply estimation methods that aim at the detection of the relevant effect structure by using penalization methods. In this work, the effect structure in the Cox frailty model, which is the most widely used model t...

Introduction: Frailty is a common geriatric syndrome. Studies of frailty and old age have been able to help reduce its underlying causes and complication. Understanding the frailty and its associated factors in developing countries such as Iran, can help gather information on conditions of the elderly and better plan for this age population. Therefore, the present study was implemented to inves...