Abstract

Frailty is a syndrome of growing importance given the global increase in the number of older people. While frailty is a complex, multifactorial process, poor nutritional status is considered to be a key contributor to its pathophysiology. However, the role of nutrition and its influence on the development and progression of frailty is poorly understood. As nutrition is a modifiable risk factor for frailty, future prevention and treatment strategies should consider the potential of diet and dietary change as a component of interventions. This article reports on a UK Nutrition Research Partnership 'Hot Topic' workshop on nutrition and frailty. The aim of the workshop was to bring together experts and early career researchers from a range of disciplines to synthesise current understanding of dietary influences on frailty, with a focus on opportunities for prevention and treatment.

Highlights

  • Frailty, defined as an increased vulnerability to stressors across multiple bodily systems, is common in older populations and is associated with poor health outcomes that include hospitalisation, institutionalisation, and greater mortality (Clegg et al, 2013)

  • Focusing on a UK context, data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey were discussed, as well as findings on overall diet quality and patterns from the British Regional Heart Study; this study described associations between the healthy diet indicator (HDI) and elderly dietary index (EDI) and frailty (Parsons et al, 2019)

  • Frailty is a syndrome of ever-growing importance given the ageing populations around the world

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Summary

Background

Frailty, defined as an increased vulnerability to stressors across multiple bodily systems, is common in older populations and is associated with poor health outcomes that include hospitalisation, institutionalisation, and greater mortality (Clegg et al, 2013). To enable progress in understanding the potential of nutrition to prevent and treat frailty requires a multi-disciplinary approach, in particular to bring clinical experts in frailty and geriatric medicine together with nutritional scientists and experts in closely related fields of appetite, the microbiome, and the metabolome This workshop was designed to bring clinical experts in geriatric medicine together with nutritional scientists, with a mix of senior and early career researchers, to discuss current evidence and develop a new network that will support and foster future research in this area. Building capacity in nutritional expertise and forming effective links between the academic geriatric medicine and nutritional science communities will foster and support future research on nutrition and health in older age, with opportunity to develop translation of this research into clinical practice Bringing together this new multidisciplinary group, the workshop aligned with the aims of the UK NRP

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