Media Releases and Opportunities

In a new paper in Nature Aging, Dalhousie University scientists describe how people accumulate health deficits with age, how that information can be used to understand aging better and what it means for public policy.

Dr. Susan Howlett from the Pharmacology and Medicine departments, Dr. Andrew Rutenberg of the Physics Department and Dr. Kenneth Rockwood with the Department of Medicine examine how a frailty index, which is a count of age-related health problems, is key to that understanding.

Everyone ages, but not at the same rate. The frailty index approach shows that the more health deficits someone has, the frailer they are. Frailty is not a disease. Instead, the degree of frailty influences how severe diseases might be. For example, we now know that protein abnormalities seen in Alzheimer’s patients are not always expressed as dementia. That may change, however, depending on the person’s degree of frailty.

The frailty index was developed at Dalhousie in 2001 by Dr. Rockwood and his late colleague, Dr. Arnold Mitnitski, and has since been taken up by countries around the world as an important tool for conducting translational research on aging. Being able to estimate the rate of aging both for groups and individuals gives this approach its power and can be used to target interventions and develop custom care plans that embrace the complexity of frailty.

This work also helps us understand population aging. Aging starts at age about 15 years and we accumulate age-associated health deficits at a rate of 4.5 to five per cent per year. Just like with compound interest, this means that the number of deficits doubles every 15 years, with age 75 to 90 being the last doubling time for most. It is also when most dementia cases are diagnosed, and heart failure and a host of other common age-related illnesses set in.

Dr. Rockwood is available to discuss the research and the importance of understanding frailty at a time when the leading edge of the baby boom is turning 75 -- a wave that won’t peak for another 10 years and is bound to have significant impacts on people’s health and health care.

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Media contact:
Alison Auld
Senior Research Reporter
Communications, Marketing and Creative Services
Dalhousie University
Cell: 1-902-220-0491
Email: alison.auld@dal.ca