Advancing the visibility of frailty research: Upcoming spotlight on novel and exciting research questions
The term “frail” has evolved from a catch-all phrase to describe older persons with a wide range of health conditions to a more refined set of theories and definitions that aim to characterize systemic vulnerability to poor health outcomes. Research on frailty has flourished in recent years, and this growing energy to study and utilize our understanding to best improve the health of older adults sits at a tipping point that we believe can benefit from a targeted focus on existing gaps in our frailty-related knowledge.
To this end, BMC Geriatrics has announced a call for a collection of papers focused on frailty research: https://bmcgeriatr.biomedcentral.com/frailty. Categories include: Epidemiology and Measurement; Frailty Biology; Frailty and Clinical Care; and Interdisciplinary Topics. As noted in a recent editorial, there are four topics highlighted in hopes of advancing the field toward tackling novel and exciting research questions:
1) Causes of frailty, distinguishing by primary, biologically-driven causes or secondary disease-driven processes that lead to frailty.
2) Innovative interventions, including targeting frailty itself as well as approaches for care delivery for frail persons
3) Biological studies of novel biological mechanisms responsible for the generalized physiological dysregulation associated with frailty, specifically omics-based studies
4) Integrated solutions beyond clinical medicine for identifying and managing frailty
The call for papers for the Frailty collection is open now; please consider submitting your research!
The full editorial by the collection’s Guest Editors, Prof. Ivan Aprahamian and Dr. Qian-Li Xue, is available here: “Shaping the next steps of research on frailty: challenges and opportunities.”