Assignment: Fraility in Patients

Assignment: Fraility in Patients
Assignment: Fraility in Patients
Assignment: Fraility in Patients
Week 1 Discussion Previous Next Discussion For this assignment, you will review the case study below and post a discussion for the class answering the noted questions. You are evaluating a 78 year old white male who comes to your office today with unintentional weight loss of 10lb in the last year, self-reported exhaustion weakness based on grip strength, and slow walking speed, and low physical activity. Notes that he has been feeling worse over the past 6 months and just does not have the strength to do anything anymore. The patient states they are not currently on any medications except a multivitamin. He notes that he lives alone and does not want to leave his house. Answer the following questions with supportive rationale: What questions should you as the patient/family to further assess? What screening tools would be appropriate in this case? Do you have concerns with fraility in this patient? If so why? What referrals should be made if any on this patient?
Frail patients often present with an increased burden of symptoms, medical complexity, and reduced tolerance for medical interventions. Awareness of frailty and associated risks for adverse outcomes, and an understanding of its biological basis, can improve care for this most vulnerable subset of patients.Frailty is most often defined as a syndrome of physiological decline in late life, characterized by marked vulnerability to adverse health outcomes. Frail older adults are less able to adapt to stressors such as acute illness or trauma than younger or non-frail older adults. This increased vulnerability contributes to increased risk for multiple adverse outcomes, including procedural complications, falls, institutionalization, disability, and death []. Increasingly, frailty in older patients is considered the hallmark geriatric syndrome and a forerunner to many other geriatric syndromes, including falls, fractures, delirium, and incontinence.
Importantly, old age itself does not define frailty. Some patients remain vigorous, despite advanced age, while others have gradual yet unrelenting functional decline in the absence of apparent disease states, or failure to rebound following illness or hospitalization.
Although there is no gold standard for detecting frailty in older adults, multiple frailty screening tools have been developed and utilized for risk assessment and epidemiologic study. These tools have mostly been utilized to identify older adults at high risk of adverse outcomes in a variety of clinical settings. Clinicians from a variety of disciplines are utilizing frailty status to identify patients at highest risk of adverse outcomes related to procedures and interventions, and working towards safer interventions.
This topic will review the definition, pathophysiology, epidemiology, and diagnosis of frailty and present a clinical approach that may attenuate vulnerability and relieve symptoms.