Background: The term "frailty" has been used clinically as a global concept to describe a condition, common in the old, of impaired strength, endurance, and balance, vulnerability to trauma and other stressors, and high risk for morbidity, disability, and mortality. A variety of factors may contribute to frailty or to one or more of its specific features. These include inflammatory, musculoskeletal, cardio respiratory, metabolic, hematologic, neurologic, immunologic and endocrine factors. Hormones important to the development of frailty that has been proposed include testosterone, luteinizing hormone (LH) and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). Objective: to study the association between LH level and frailty among the elderly Method: A case control study was carried out. The case group included 80 Frail elderly subjects selected according to the American Geriatric Society Criteria; whereas 80 non-Frail elderly subjects were selected as the control group. Each participant was subjected to Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment and laboratory assessment of luteinizing hormone. Results: LH level was lower in frail subjects compared to non frail. Lower levels were significantly correlated with increased degree of dependency in both frail males and females. Conclusion: Luteinizing hormone level was lower among frail elderly. Further studies are needed to confirm such an association and to plan clinical practice accordingly.

No abstract

No abstract

Background: A new neuropsychiatric battery named Ain-shams cognitive assessment tool (ASCA) targets MCI and dementia diagnosis. The current study aims to determine the diagnostic performance of ASCA among older adults with MCI. Methods:A comparative cross-sectional study included one hundred elderly persons (aged ≥60 years) both males and females recruited from El-Mansoura university hospital outpatients' clinics, divided into 2 groups based on the Arabic version of Rowland Universal Dementia Assessment Scale (A-RUDAS) score: Group A: Fifty participants with MCI, defined as A-RUDAS score<24. Group B: Fifty participants with normal cognitive function. The data collection process included: Step 1: Comprehensive geriatric assessment.Step 2: cognitive assessment by using A-RUDAS, Step 3: Applying ASCA. Step 4: Statistical analysis was done. RESULTS:The Mean age in the MCI group was 68.9±4.1 years. Participants who were assisted in IADL and had a higher risk of malnutrition were significantly more frequent in the MCI group, P-value 0.004 and 0.02 respectively. The total ASCA score for the current study participants at cut-off point ≤95 had perfect diagnostic characteristics in differentiating MCI from normal participants with sensitivity and specificity of 100%. The total score of Verbal learning and recall tests of ASCA of the current study participants at ≤39 had the highest MCI diagnostic performance with sensitivity and specificity 96.0% and 90.0% respectively. There was no statistically significant association between the participants` educational level and their performance in ASCA battery tests.CONCLUSION: ASCA was a valid tool for MCI diagnosis among literate and illiterate participants.

Background Hospitalization of the elderly patients carry greatest risk for complications and unfavorable outcomes, so better outcome requires a comprehensive geriatric assessment by multidisciplinary teams to detect the patients at higher risk for functional decline and institutionalization, such care and assessment have shown to reduce the hospital stay and functional decline, also increases the chances of living at home, one of this multi-dimentional management is the use of prognostic indices which predict the outcome of the admitted elderly patients, of which is MPI. The MPI showed good accuracy in estimating both short-and long-term mortality in hospitalized older patients with the most common conditions leading to death (Pilotto et al., 2012).