Identification and Exercise Intervention for the Frailty Syndrome of the Older Adults

Older people consume large portions of the health care costs. Methods to reduce their health service and long-term care utilizations are an important issue. Early identification of the at risk elderly and providing preventing interventions in time could be one of the solutions. “Frailty”was a newly defined syndrome in the elderly, which will make older people highly vulnerable to adverse health outcomes, such as disability, dependency, need for long-term care, and mortality, etc. The definitions, proposed mechanisms and symptoms of the frailty syndrome have been studied by some researchers. Besides, defining the phenotypes of the elderly frailty and classifying cohorts of older adults into frail, pre-frail, and non-frail groups were proposed. Very few has been done to investigate the elderly frailty syndrome in Taiwan as well as the intervention modes and effects. The main purposes of this proposed 3-year project will firstly, to comprehensive assess and follow up a group of older adults and try to find the (or a battery of ) physical function tests that could possibly be the screening index for the elderly frailty syndrome. Secondly, to understand and compare the changes of these assessment and functional test results as well as some adverse health outcomes, such as mortality rate, falling rate, hospitalization rate, etc. of the older adults in different frailty levels after 6-month exercise interventions. One hundred eighty community-dwelling older people aged over 65 years old that evenly belonged to 3 categories of frailty (non-, pre-, and frail) will be recruited and followed for 3 years. Three intervention programs-mechanical weight resistance exercise group, modified Tai-Chi plus resistance band home exercise group, and health and nutrition education group will be administrated to the older adults (20 for each level, each group). Their basic and demographic data, disease or comorbid history, activity level, cognition, depression status, etc. will be interview and physical functional tests will be examined and compared before, 3-, 6-, 12-, 18-month after the interventions. SPSS software will be applied for the statistic analysis. Descriptive analyses, Pearson correlation coefficients, ANCOVA(Analysis of Co-variance), repeated ANOVA, two-way ANOVA, Cox proportional hazard model analysis, and ROC curve for sensitivity, specificity, predictability of the markers will be analyzed.

Project ID:PC9907-2536
External Project ID:NSC99-2410-H182-037