At the beginning of 2019, researchers from Canada and the United States of America published a research paper on the possible link between frailty and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia in the journal The Lancet Neurology.
For their analysis, the team brought together data from 456 US participants of whom 242 had been diagnosed with either possible or probable AD dementia. The study also included an evaluation of those participants’ brains that died during the study, giving insight into the brains’ pathology after death.
The team found that a higher degree of frailty was tied to a higher likelihood of AD pathology along with subsequent dementia. At the same time, they also reported that people with a lower degree of frailty seemed to be better able to tolerate AD pathology.
In their conclusion, the team stated that their findings support the idea that frailty influences clinical expression of dementia and should therefore be taken into consideration during the management and treatment of older adults.
Nevertheless, the researchers also underlined that their findings bring the need to further explore how frailty and cognition change over time to better understand the relationship. Apart from that, they also provided insights into the limitations of their study such as other possibly competing risks that were not taken into account.
The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(18)30371-5
