Clinical management of frailty: advances and challenges

Frailty was first described in the general population living in the community. Its characteristics, components, underlying mechanisms, screening and diagnostic criteria, prognosis, and indeed prevention and treatment have been developed and tested usually in older people in non-clinical settings. However, many of the adverse outcomes are closely related with events leading to clinical settings or taking place in those settings, so it is not surprising that the prevalence of frailty is extremely high in hospital and other clinical environments, being hospitalization one of the main factors accounting for the poor prognosis of older frail people.