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The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences Advance Access published online on November 3, 2009
The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, doi:10.1093/gerona/glp162
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Understanding Frailty

Walter Bortz

Stanford University School of Medicine, Bolivar Lane, Portola Valley, California

Walter Bortz, MD, Stanford University School of Medicine, 167 Bolivar Lane, Portola Valley, CA 94028. Email:drwbortz@aol.com

Received: September 15, 2009; Accepted: September 20, 2009
The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

THE report of Linda Fried and colleagues (1) in this issue extends and complements their consecutive effort to build a rigorous conceptual framework of frailty. The importance of the topic and its general lack of address endorse the significance of these data.

For me, the most important new insight is provided by the authors’ strong suggestion that the nonlinearity of the multiple system defects presumes the involvement of a complex system. Like the weather, the Internet, and even health, frailty resists facile measurement and definition. Fried and colleagues have done much to change this. Their measurement of six specific systems concludes that the frailty phenotype is related to the numbers of defects, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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