Age-Related Frailty: A Clinical Model for Geroscience?

In their everyday practice, geriatricians are confronted with the fact that older age and multimorbidity are associated to frailty. Indeed, if we take the example of a very old person with no diseases that progressively becomes frail with no other explanation, there is a natural temptation to link frailty to aging. On the other hand, when an old person with a medical history of diabetes, arthritis and congestive heart failure becomes frail there appears an obvious relationship between frailty and comorbidity. The unsolved question is: Considering that frailty is multifactorial and in the majority of cases comorbidity and aging are acting synergistically, can we disentangle the main contributor to the origin of frailty: disease or aging? We believe that it is important to be able to differentiate age-related frailty from frailty related to comorbidity. In fact, with the emergence of geroscience, the physiopathology, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment will probably have to be different in the future.