If this is not your name, click here.
| | If this is not your name, click here. | | |
| | Contact Us | Order Now | Journals | Bookstore | Register a colleague | | |
| |  Older Adults With Serious Mental Illness at Greater Risk for Developing Frailty: Presented at AAGP By Carole VanSickle Ellis SAVANNAH, Va -- March 8, 2010 -- If a an older patient develops a serious mental illness, physicians should also be on the lookout for complications related to the development of clinical frailty, researchers stated here on March 7 at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP). The study, headed by Laura Barre, MD, Dartmouth Medical School, Lebanon, New Hampshire, determined that frailty works with other factors in association with mental illness to create an increased overall risk level for patients. Patients with serious mental illness tend to have higher morbidity and earlier mortality than the general population. As a result, researchers believe that there may be an association between serious mental illness and frailty -- defined as multisystem deterioration associated with an increased risk of disability, hospitalisation, institutionalisation, and death. The researchers conducted a secondary analysis of baseline data on 183 older adults with serious mental illness who participated in the HOPES trial. Frailty was defined as 10% body weight loss in 1 year; weakness defined as an average score of <=2 on the Short-Form Health Survey; slowness as a Brief Psychiatric Reading Scale, motor retardation score >=3; and low activity as a Scale for Assessment of Negative Symptoms physical anergia score of >=4. Of the patients, 27% were frail. There were no differences between frail and nonfrail individuals with respect to age (mean age 59.9 vs 60.8 years). However, the frail group did trend towards a higher prevalence of major depression, with 32% being depressed compared with 21.1% in the nonfrail groups. In addition, 72% of the frail group was female, while 52.6% of the nonfrail group was female. There were also higher proportions of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis in the frail group, along with negative psychiatric symptoms being strongly associated with frailty. “We definitely can identify a subset of older adults that have frailty,” said Dr. Barre. “If you are female, you are much more likely to be frail [5 times more].” The researchers also noted that they had established a trend in that if an individual has depression, the patient is more likely to be frail. “The next step is to see if frailty status can predict a downstream effect,” said Dr. Barre. The group noted that the study was limited by a sampling bias, since the study group was composed of volunteers, a potential for missed effects when stratified by gender and the limited measures available to define the frailty criteria. Funding for this research was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health. [Presentation title: Identifying Frailty in Older Adults With Serious Mental Illness. Abstract EI08]
|
