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Frailty in Clinical Care

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging

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Synonyms

Fragility; Frailty assessment; Frailty management; Frailty measurement; Geriatric medicine; Older adults; Overview

The health care challenges of an aging population cannot be adequately addressed by health care systems and providers without fully integrating the paradigm of frailty. The construct of frailty is both robust and complex, perfectly suited to evolving societal needs in clinical care. A family of frailty measures are available for both case-finding and assessment. Judgment-based measures, physical performance measures, self-report, and the electronic frailty index are well-suited for case-finding. Multidimensional measures are ideal for the further assessment of frailty. The assessing teams should recommend physical exercise, ideally group-based and multimodal. Individuals who live with frailty should be guided with respectful language to develop an integrated plan of care and to consider therapies that are most appropriate to their circumstances and wishes. A...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geriatric Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Darryl B. Rolfson

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  1. Darryl B. Rolfson
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Correspondence to Darryl B. Rolfson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Population Division, UN Dept of Economic Social Affairs Population Division, New York, NY, USA

    Danan Gu

  2. Department of Population Health Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA

    Matthew E. Dupre

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  1. Department of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Olga Theou

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Rolfson, D.B. (2020). Frailty in Clinical Care. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_358-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_358-1

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