Welcome to the conversation on Frailty Science.
Karen Bandeen Roche, PhD
Frank Hurley and Catharine Dorrier Chair of Biostatistics
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Co-Director, Johns Hopkins Older Americans Independence Center
Jeremy Walston, MD
Raymond and Anna Lublin Professor of Geriatric Medicine
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Co-Director, Johns Hopkins Older Americans Independence Center
Welcome to the Frailty Science blog! Whether you are a researcher, clinician, student, policy maker, advocate, older adult, or caregiver—we hope you will find something interesting or useful on the site. We aim to provide a gateway to information for those seeking to learn more about frailty, vulnerability and resiliency in older adults. We hope you will enjoy checking in for the latest frailty-related findings, evidence-based reporting on research and clinical topics, best-practice recommendations from national and international organizations, and guidance on frailty assessment instruments.
This blog will be one of our website’s avenues to facilitate communication across the community of scientists and clinicians interested in understanding frailty and resilience in aging. Our Older Americans Independence Center, a federally funded research center at Johns Hopkins University, has rigorously studied frailty for nearly two decades. We aim to advance understanding of frailty-related biology, measurement, clinical practice, and public health implications for our aging society. Significant new research findings from this center and our outstanding group of collaborators will be featured regularly. Leaders in the field from around the world will also be invited to provide commentary on important work and present a global picture of frailty.
In addition to providing regularly occurring commentary on findings, we also aim through our blog to highlight areas we consider to have knowledge gaps or points of confusion. Addressing frailty and promoting resilience stand to benefit older adults—but there remains a great need for randomized controlled evidence in order to establish the effectiveness of intervention strategies. How frailty and resilience should be measured, and even what one means by these terms, remain under debate. There is a growing literature investigating the cellular, physiological, social and environmental underpinnings of frailty—but the specific pathways remain to be elucidated. We see these areas and more as in critical need of discovery, and our blog will address them in greater depth in the coming months.
Most urgently, as the COVID-19 crisis is upon us, insights into the pathways resulting in aging-related vulnerability and frailty may be the same that illuminate what it is that triggers catastrophic responses to COVID-19 infection, and others like it. Our blog’s mission is to speed the way to achieving the promise frailty researchers of diverse opinions all seek—to add quality years to life by delaying frailty onset, promoting resilience, and developing best-practice guidelines for clinical management in the face of frailty. At the least, we hope you will enjoy the conversation.
May 4, 2020