Abstract
Frailty is complex in its pathophysiological basis but also in terms of the prognostic and diagnostic clues it provides us with. Traditionally, clinical and anthropological characteristics have been used to provide a diagnosis of frailty and an assessment of a patients overall prognosis. Little attention has been given to the use of laboratory parameters as biomarkers that might improve on the discriminative power and accuracy of the current frailty criteria. Clinical studies have tended to focus on the association between isolated systems and/or single biomarkers with frailty scores. This approach overlooks the complex nature of a syndrome that involves the concomitant participation of several impaired systems. FRAILOMIC adopts a unique clinical approach to the study of frailty. Not only does our study assess the role of ‘sets’ of biomarkers that span several systems but it also includes assessment of the involvement of novel ‘omics’ (genomics, proteomics and metabolomics) indicators.