Abstract
The improvement of life quality and medical advances has resulted in increased life expectancy. Despite this, health status commonly worsens in the last years of life. Frailty is an intermediate and reversible state that often precedes dependency and therefore, its identification may be essential to prevent dependency. However, there is no consensus on the best tools to identify frailty. In this sense, diverse molecules have been proposed as potential biomarkers. Some investigations pointed to an increased chronic inflammation or inflammaging with frailty, while others did not report such differences. In this work, we evaluated the circulating concentration of the inflammaging markers in adults and older adults (aged over 70 years) by ELISA and Luminex techniques. The Barthel Index was applied for the evaluation of dependency and Timed up-and-go, Gait Speed, Short Physical Performance Battery, Tilburg Frailty Indicator and Gerontopole Frailty Screening Tool were used for the identification of frailty. CRP, TNF-α, IL-6 and albumin concentrations were measured, and we found that elevated inflammation is present in older adults, while no differences with frailty and dependency were reported. Our results were consistent for all the evaluated frailty scales, highlighting the need to reconsider increased inflammation as a biomarker of frailty.
Highlights
The improvement of life quality and medical advances has resulted in increased life expectancy
As frailty was evaluated by 5 different tests—Timed up-and-go (TUG), Gait speed (GS), Short physical performance battery (SPPB), Tilburg frailty indicator (TFI) and Gerontopole frailty screening tool (GFST)—the classification of each frailty scale was considered, and no significant differences were reported (Figs. 1D–H, 2D–H)
We found no significant differences for C-reactive protein (CRP), TNF-α, IL-6 and albumin concentration in serum between robust, frail and non-autonomous older adults (Figs. 3D, 4D, 5D and 6D)
Summary
The improvement of life quality and medical advances has resulted in increased life expectancy. Frailty is a heterogeneous state comprising physical, psychological and cognitive impairment, and even if it has been widely studied for decades, no consensus has been reached on its definition and on the best tools to identify frailty. Regarding the concept of frailty, a work by Rodríguez-Mañas and colleagues gathered the definitions of experts in the field and presented a list of accepted statements that define frailty[6] This list included aspects of physical performance, nutritional status, mental health, and cognition. They concluded that, even if some concepts of frailty are widely agreed, there is no consensus on an operational definition of frailty. The measurement of circulating inflammatory markers in blood is regularly performed and does not require complex or expensive procedures, so it is a promising source of biomarkers
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