Physical frailty and sarcopenia: taking advantage of their commonalities

Abstract

Physical frailty and sarcopenia are two agerelated conditions indicated as key risk factors for incident disability and health-related negative events in the elderly. Nevertheless, to date, their clinical implementation is still limited, largely because of methodological ambiguities and disagreement about their operationalizations. In order to bypass the current stall-position in the field and try to identify an objective, standardized, and clinically relevant target for interventions, it might be hypothesized to redesign the limits of a pre-disability physical risk condition around the inner core shared by both physical frailty and sarcopenia. Thus, preliminary research initiatives [like the sarcopenia and physical frailty in older people: multicomponent treatment strategies (SPRINTT) project] are proposing to explore whether physical frailty (or poor physical performance) may represent the clinical manifestation of a specific biological substratum (i.e., low muscle mass) on which build up novel interventions against disability in the elderly.