[Falls, frailty and osteoporosis in the elderly: a public health problem]

Elderly people can be subdivided into three groups: healthy elderly persons (65-70% of the population), elderly subjects with diseases (about 5%) and frail old people. Frailty represents "age-related physiologic vulnerability resulting from impaired homeotasic stock and a reduced capacity of the organism to withstand stress". It could lead elderly subjects to pathological, barely reversible, ageing.

One of the main objective of geriatricians is to develop useful screening tools to identify people at high risk, thus allowing them to benefit from preventive interventions as early as possible. It has been suggested that the decline in homeostatic stock involves numerous physiological systems. Those at the core of frailty would be neuromuscular changes resulting in sarcopenia, neuroendocrine dysregulation, and immune disorders. A recent study has shown that increased levels of interleukin 6 is a risk factor for frailty.

Work in progress aimed at identification of at-risk patients should: lead to early detection; draw attention on underestimated fields such as the nutritional status, sarcopenia, or gait disorders; promote the development of the standardized gerontological evaluation in order to identify the different components of frailty; and promote the development of non-pharmacological programmes including physical training, nutritional managing, and optimal social life.