Frailty in elderly people: an evolving concept.

Abstract

T he terms frail and are now part of the language of geriatric medicine and gerontology.'` Characterizing the physiologic basis of frailty has been described as one of the most important research endeavours in medical gerontology.2'5 However, frail and are often undefined.5 As the concept of frailty is increasingly invoked (a MEDLINE search revealed that citations with the MeSH term increased from 13 in 1986 to 80 in the first 9 months of 1992), it is important to understand what is meant by the term and to discover if this understanding offers any useful insights. In this article we review existing definitions of frailty and examine an alternative working definition that en-