Article Text
Abstract
Objectives To examine the capacity of existing cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk algorithms widely used in primary care, to predict frailty.
Design Prospective cohort study. Risk algorithms at baseline (1997–1999) were the Framingham CVD, coronary heart disease and stroke risk scores, and the Systematic Coronary Risk Evaluation.
Setting Civil Service departments in London, UK.
Participants 3895 participants (73% men) aged 45–69 years and free of CVD at baseline.
Main outcome measure Status of frailty at the end of follow-up (2007–2009), based on the following indicators: self-reported exhaustion, low physical activity, slow walking speed, low grip strength and weight loss.
Results At the end of the follow-up, 2.8% (n=108) of the sample was classified as frail. All four CVD risk scores were associated with future risk of developing frailty, with ORs per one SD increment in the score ranging from 1.35 (95% CI 1.21 to 1.51) for the Framingham stroke score to 1.42 (1.23 to 1.62) for the Framingham CVD score. These associations remained after excluding incident CVD cases. For comparison, the corresponding ORs for the risk scores and incident cardiovascular events varied between 1.36 (1.15 to 1.61) and 1.64 (1.50 to 1.80) depending on the risk algorithm.
Conclusions The use of CVD risk scores in clinical practice may also have utility for frailty prediction.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Supplementary materials
Supplementary Data
This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.
Files in this Data Supplement:
- Data supplement 1 - Online appendix