Implications of frailty before and after intensive care unit admission

In the decade since the first publications related to frailty in those with critical illness, the study of frailty has rapidly increased. The purpose of this review is to update the reader on recent advances across several important areas of frailty research: how best to identify frailty in those with critical illness, studies describing the relationship between frailty and delirium, and how frailty affects outcomes for those with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which, despite rates and severity of acute infection declining, still tremendously impacts patients long after the acute infection, resulting in symptoms of long COVID-19.

A number of frailty assessment tools exist, to date, the Clinical Frailty Scale based on the deficit accumulation approach to defining frailty, is the most commonly used in ICU studies. Several novel frailty instruments for the ICU are being developed. Because tools assessing frailty by the phenotypic and deficit accumulation approaches identify different populations, careful choice of a frailty assessment tool is warranted.Frailty and delirium are hypothesized to represent different clinical expressions of a similar underlying vulnerability, thus identifying frailty may be a useful means by which to identify patients at high risk of becoming delirious. Recent studies show that frailty at ICU admission is a predictor of the development of delirium.Finally, frailty and its outcomes were studied in patients with COVID-19. As with other causes of critical illness, frailty was highly prevalent in those admitted to the ICU and is associated with greater mortality. Frailty was also associated with increased decisions to limit life support treatments, but these decisions were not different among those admitted with COVID-19 or for other reasons.

Frailty in those with critical illness is an emerging field of study. Future work to define the optimal means by which to identify this syndrome and how best to manage critically ill patients with frailty are needed.