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The need of operational paradigms for frailty in older persons: the SPRINTT project

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Abstract

The exploration of frailty as a pre-disability geriatric condition represents one of the most promising research arenas of modern medicine. Frailty is today indicated as a paradigmatic condition around which the traditional healthcare systems might be re-shaped and optimized in order to address the complexities and peculiarities of elders. Unfortunately, the lack of consensus around a single operational definition has limited the clinical implementation of frailty in clinical practice. In these last years, growing attention (even beyond the traditional boundaries of geriatric medicine) has been given to physical performance measures. These instruments have shown to be predictive of negative health-related events and able to support an accurate estimation of the “biological age” in late life. The strong construct of physical performance measures also makes them particularly suitable for the assessment of the frailty status. Furthermore, the adoption of physical performance measures may help render the frailty condition more organ-specific (i.e., centred on the skeletal muscle quality) and less heterogeneous than currently perceived. The translation of the frailty concept by means of physical performance measures implicitly represents an attempt to go beyond traditional paradigms. In this context, the recently funded “Sarcopenia and Physical fRailty IN older people: multi-componenT Treatment strategies” (SPRINTT) project (largely based on such a novel approach) may indeed fill an important gap in the field and provide key insights for counteracting the disabling cascade in the elderly.

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Acknowledgements

The present work is part of the activities of the “Sarcopenia and Physical fRailty IN older people: multi-componenT Treatment strategies” (SPRINTT) project, funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) as part of the 2013 9th call for proposals entitled “Developing innovative therapeutic interventions against physical frailty and sarcopenia as a prototype geriatric indication” (IMI–JU 115621). The work was also partly supported by the “Centro Studi Achille e Linda Lorenzon” (E.M., R.C.), Fondazione Roma (NCDs Call for Proposals 2013; E.M., R.C.), and intramural research grants from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (D3.2 2013 and D3.2 2015; E.M., F.L., R.C.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gérontopôle, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    Matteo Cesari & Bruno Vellas

  2. Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

    Matteo Cesari & Bruno Vellas

  3. Department of Geriatrics, Neurosciences and Orthopedics, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart School of Medicine, Rome, Italy

    Emanuele Marzetti, Riccardo Calvani, Roberto Bernabei & Francesco Landi

  4. Sanofi R&D, Chilly-Mazarin, Paris, France

    Philippe Bordes

  5. Global Translational Medicine, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland

    Ronenn Roubenoff

  6. Geriatrics and Geriatric Emergency Care, IRCCS-INRCA, Ancona, Italy

    Antonio Cherubini

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  1. Matteo Cesari
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MC has served as consultant for and/or received honoraria for scientific presentations from Nestlé. All the authors of the present work are partners of the SPRINTT consortium, which is partly funded by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).

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Cesari, M., Marzetti, E., Calvani, R. et al. The need of operational paradigms for frailty in older persons: the SPRINTT project. Aging Clin Exp Res 29, 3–10 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-016-0712-5

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