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60% of the elderly persons above 65 years of age, suffer from some degree of the Frailty Syndrome. The Frailty Syndrome is considered as “The holy grail of geriatric medicine” (WHO – Clinical Consortium on Healthy Ageing - 2016). From this information, it is apparent that Frailty screening, diagnosis and treatment are of major relevance, more so, because Frailty is potentially modifiable with adequate and opportune simple interventions.
Several methodologies have been proposed to identify Frailty, but Fried’s frailty scale is the most widely used instrument in Frailty research. Fried et al. suggest that individuals should be classified as normal, pre-frail, or frail based on the following factors (5): unintentional weight loss, perceived level of exhaustion, reduced hand grip strength, slow walking speed and low physical activity. A Frail condition is considered as the presence of three or more of these characteristics and pre-frail when one or two characteristics ae present.
The implementation of a systematic way to assess frailty can be reached through a combination of a hand grip strength measurement, weight control, walking speed assessment and inquiries.
With the assessment of the Frailty Syndrome condition, professionals can propose simple personalized prescriptions on physical activity and nutrition, mitigating and even reversing this condition, in an inexpensive way, thus maintaining or even improving quality of life of their patients, but most importantly, significantly extending the period over which quality of life is maintained.
The volume of screenings that needs to be done for such a large population, demands a fast and simple procedure, and it must be effective and inexpensive as well. However, to this day, to make this assessment, special training is needed and there isn’t an integrated system capable of making this important assessment in a simple and effective way, and realistically viable to be widely spread.
Currently, the assessment of frailty is done at appointments, usually in nutrition, but are not integrated - it is up to the health professionals to assess the 5 different criteria, integrate them in a manual way and finally classify the frailty level.