Life’s Essential 8

Frailty as an upstream target for intervention: A unifying approach to intervening in the trajectories of health, function, and disease in late life

“…This transformational approach recognizes that multicomponent pharmacological, behavioral, or lifestyle interventions targeting biological aging upstream of disability 16 may help insulate older adults from the cascade linking biological aging to deficits to disability. If only a small trigger is needed to unbalance homeostasis in a highly vulnerable individual, while a major event may be withstood by someone more robust—how may we prevent vulnerability (i.e., frailty) or bolster those with frailty?…”

“…in frail and non-frail populations may identify additional potentially preventable risk factors as targets for future intervention efforts (Figure 1). Moreover, use of gerotherapeutics shown to slow biological aging which include not only medications, 15 but also behavioral interventions like exercise or improved sleep, 16 may help diminish the risk of delirium by attenuating the underlying predisposing drivers (Figure 1). This type of a multicomponent and multidisciplinary approach allows for a more complete model of the pathways from vulnerability to adverse events while highlighting novel and even unexpected opportunities to intervene multiple emergent syndromes before they manifest as a disability.…”