Grant: Operating Grant

Frailty is a new term increasingly used to describe a complex syndrome characterized by a loss of reserves, including energy, physical ability, mental function, and overall health. Frailty has been described in elderly patients and correlates with clinically important outcomes such as survival and quality-of-life. To date, frailty has not been studied in sick patients admitted to intensive care. We propose to study frailty in this population. Our rationale is we believe that pre-existing frailty in very sick patients admitted to intensive care may be an important factor in determining whether they survive or whether they are capable of recovering from their illness to live independently. The proposed study is for a prospective observational cohort study to be performed at two academic and four community hospitals in Alberta of consecutive patients admitted to intensive care over who are aged 50 years or older and expected to survive greater than 24 hours. We plan to measure frailty, using a previously developed and validated frailty score, in these patients and assess whether frailty has any relationship to treatment intensity, limitations on supportive therapy, occurrence of adverse events, survival, quality-of-life or independent living and health resource use. We believe that frailty has relevance and is under-diagnosed in critically ill patients. We believe this study will describe the burden of frailty amongst older critically ill patients and provide insight into its impact on important outcomes.