Frailty is a Medical Condition, Not an Inevitable Result of Aging (Op-Ed)

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http://www.livescience.com/41602-frailty-is-medical-condition.html

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As a medical resident 30 years ago, Ava Kaufman remembers puzzling over some of the elderly patients who came to the primary-care practice at George Washington University Hospital. They weren't really ill, at least not with any identifiable diseases. But they weren't well, either.

They were thin and weak. They had no energy. They tired easily. Their walking speed was agonizingly slow. "We couldn't put our finger on a specific diagnosis or problem,'' Kaufman says. "We didn't have a word for it then.''

Today we do. It's called frailty. There have always been frail people, but only in recent years has the term "frailty" become a medical diagnosis, defined by specific symptoms and increasingly focused on by those who deal with the medical issues of the elderly. Clinicians now are looking at ways to prevent or delay frailty, sometimes even reverse it.

"Frailty is not an age, it's a condition," says Kaufman, a Bethesda internist and geriatrician. "We know it when we see it, and it's always been with us."