Frailty Is More Than Just Weakness. Here’s What to Know

And it’s projected to become more prevalent in the near future, says Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, a professor of medicine at Dalhousie University in Canada who developed one of the scales for diagnosing frailty. “It’s the demographic imperative,” he says. “In 2021 the leading edge of the baby boom generation turned 75 years old, and 75 is the age at which most of the diseases of aging take off. So now frailty is not some mystical, mythical far-off thing.”

However, frailty is not inevitable—and to some extent, it’s possible to undo some of the damage. Here’s what to know.

One of the best ways to identify frailty is a comprehensive geriatric assessment, in which a team of health care professionals look at many different aspects of an aging person’s health to get a sense of the bigger picture. But some potential tell-tale signs doctors might check for, and that you might notice on your own, include walking slowly—less than approximately 2.6 ft. (or 0.8 meters) a second, one study suggests—and taking more than 10 seconds in what’s called a “timed up and go test,” in which a person is timed getting up from a chair, walking for almost 10 ft. (3 meters), turning around, walking back, and sitting down. With frailty, “you can’t tell at a glance, but it doesn’t take that long [to detect] if you know what questions to ask…if you can see the person move,” says Rockwood.