Social supports need to be considered to prevent frailty in older adults, according to a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Public Health.
The authors said that clinicians and caregivers need to adopt a biopsychosocial model instead of one that purely relies on medical factors, because social factors play a role in frailty.
The researchers conducted the study to understand the link between social supports and the development and progression of frailty.
The team evaluated data on 1,059 older adults from the Berlin Initiative Study over the course of 2.1 years. People were evaluated twice: once between 2016 and 2017 and another time between 2018 and 2019. The researchers used a social support scale to help people gauge their social resources, and they grouped people based on five frailty categories.
When the study began, frailty prevalence in overall participants was at 33.1%. The mean age of participants was 84.3 years old, and just over half of them were women. Of participants, 47% reported moderate social support, 29.4% reported strong support and 23.6% said they had poor support.
People with poor social support had twice the odds of becoming frail compared with those with strong social support, and the results weren’t significantly different based on sex. Those with weaker social support also had worse medical status indicators, the data showed.
The prevalence of frailty in study participants didn’t differ much between support categories that the researchers assigned, but non-frail participants with poor social support had twice the odds of becoming frail over the observation period of two years compared with those with stronger support socially. Those results did not differ significantly between people of both sexes. After 2.1 years, 14.3% of participants became frail, and 5.1% died.
“Our study results underpin the role of social factors in frailty incidence and highlight social support as a potential target for frailty-preventing interventions in older adults,” the authors wrote.
