TY - JOUR
AU - Kuchel, George A.
AB -  The ability to formulate a clear clinical mission while also addressing the needs of patients, families, policymakers, and third‐party payers challenges many healthcare providers. Those of us who provide care for frail elderly adults must consider additional layers of complexity, as represented by geriatric syndromes that have often confounded existing disease‐based approaches to clinical care, education, reimbursement, manpower recruitment, and research. Thus, strategies to define, measure, and better understand the nature of the frailty that places some older adults at risk of adverse outcomes have understandably assumed a central position in the efforts of geriatricians to respond to all of these challenges. The paper by Gruenewald et al. published in this issue provides evidence that a higher baseline value for the allostatic load score, a measure that has been used as an index of multisystem physiological dysregulation, is associated with greater likelihood of frailty at 3 years of follow‐up. The authors provide conservative analysis of data obtained between 1988/89 and 1991/92 from 1,189 participants in the MacArthur Study of Successful Aging, a well‐known prospective cohort of high‐functioning older adults recruited based on baseline age, cognition, and physical performance. Moreover, their findings are in agreement with those of a 
TI - Frailty, Allostatic Load, and the Future of Predictive Gerontology
JF - Journal of American Geriatrics Society
DO - 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2009.02406.x
DA - 2009-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/frailty-allostatic-load-and-the-future-of-predictive-gerontology-Rm21E6oC8b
SP - 1704
VL - 57
IS - 9
DP - DeepDyve
ER -