Frailty: time for a new approach to health care?

In The Lancet Healthy Longevity, Joanna Blodgett and colleagues1 provide important evidence that frailty can be observed and measured in younger age groups (ie, in individuals aged ≥20 years), and is perhaps more relevant for predicting health outcomes than age. Except for women aged younger than 35 years, the results show an overall increase in mean frailty levels in all age groups for both men and women, accompanied by stable frailty lethality, from 1999 to 2018 in the USA. This increase poses some serious challenges for population health management. If people are not only failing to delay the onset of frailty in later years, but are also experiencing frailty earlier in life, this trend will result in a big challenge for health systems. [Opening paragraph]