BackgroundThe ability of acute care providers to cope with the influx of frail older patients is increasingly stressed, and changes need to be made to improve care provided to older adults. Our purpose was to conduct a scoping review to map and synthesize the literature addressing frailty in the acute care setting in order to understand how to tackle this challenge. We also aimed to highlight the current gaps in frailty research.MethodsThis scoping review included original research articles with acutely-ill Emergency Medical Services (EMS) or hospitalized older patients who were identified as frail by the authors. We searched Medline, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, Eric, and Cochrane from January 2000 to September 2015.ResultsOur database search initially resulted in 8658 articles and 617 were eligible. In 67% of the articles the authors identified their participants as frail but did not report on how they measured frailty. Among the 204 articles that did measure frailty, the most common disciplines were geriatrics (14%), emergency department (14%), and general medicine (11%). In total, 89 measures were used. This included 13 established tools, used in 51% of the articles, and 35 non-frailty tools, used in 24% of the articles. The most commonly used tools were the Clinical Frailty Scale, the Frailty Index, and the Frailty Phenotype (12% each). Most often (44%) researchers used frailty tools to predict adverse health outcomes. In 74% of the cases frailty predicted the outcome examined, typically mortality and length of stay.ConclusionsMost studies (83%) were conducted in non-geriatric disciplines and two thirds of the articles identified participants as frail without measuring frailty. There was great variability in tools used and more recently published studies were more likely to use established frailty tools. Overall, frailty appears to be a good predictor of adverse health outcomes. For frailty to be implemented in clinical practice frailty tools should help formulate the care plan and improve shared decision making. How this will happen has yet to be determined.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12877-018-0823-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Objectives: To understand the treatment goals of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, carers, and physicians; to estimate whether clinically important goals are met during treatment with donepezil; and to compare a measure of goal attainment with standard measures used to evaluate AD treatment. Methods: In a 12 month phase IV trial, 108 patients with mild to moderate AD, their primary carers, and treating physicians set goals assigned to five domains, using Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) as the primary outcome. Goal attainment was assessed quarterly. GAS scores were correlated with standard outcomes, including the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive (ADAS-cog), and the Clinician's Interview-Based Impression of Change-Plus (CIBIC-plus). Results: Physicians set fewer goals (342, mean (SD) per patient=3 (1)) than patients/carers (855, mean=9 (3)), particularly in leisure (20% by physicians compared with 76% by patients/carers), and social interaction (24% versus 49%). Physicians observed statistically significant improvement in global goal attainment for six months, and patients/carers for nine months. Patients/carers described consistent goal attainment, whereas physicians observed variable effects, such as decline in cognition but improved social interaction and behaviour. Physician global GAS scores correlated highly with the CIBIC-plus at weeks 12 (r= −0.82) and 52 (r=−0.80), but not with the ADAS-cog (r=0.12 and r=−0.45, respectively). Patient/carer global GAS scores correlated moderately with the physician's CIBIC-plus (week 12 r=−0.51; week 52 r=−0.56), and nominally with the ADAS-cog. Conclusions: Patients/carers and physicians differ in their expectations and impressions of treatment effects. Clinically important changes correlated only modestly with psychometric tests. Attainment of treatment goals does not accord with a simplistic model in which successful AD treatment means that all declines uniformly improve.

Background: In 6-month anti-dementia drug trials, a 4-point change in the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-Cog) is held to be clinically important. We examined how this change compared with measures of clinical meaningfulness.

A 4-point ADAS-cog change at 6 months is clinically meaningful for groups. Substantial individual misclassification between the ADAS-cog and clinical measures suggests no inherent meaning to a 4-point ADAS-cog change for a given patient.