Editorial: Clinical uses and alternative approaches of frailty determination

Frailty represents a greater vulnerability to stressors that increases an individual’s susceptibility to adverse health outcomes, such as disability, loss of independence, and death. As one ages, the prevalence of frailty increases and affects up to 50% of those aged 85 and older (Clegg et al., 2013). Efforts to characterize and quantify states of frailty took a substantial leap forward with the emergence of frailty assessment frameworks based on physical frailty and deficit accumulation in the early 2000s (Fried et al., 2001; Rockwood and Mitnitski, 2007; Searle et al., 2008). Since then, frailty tools have been correlated with important health outcomes relevant to aging, have been used to evaluate therapeutic benefit, and are now being explored to help scientists understand the underlying biology of frailty (Fried et al., 2001; Rockwood and Mitnitski, 2007; Brivio et al., 2019; Kwak et al., 2020; Ota and Kodama, 2022). Importantly, frailty tools have also found utility in predicting outcomes of medical and surgical interventions and continue to be refined to improve prognosis in older individuals (Ko, 2019; Nidadavolu et al., 2020; Rabelo et al., 2023).