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Suppose you have an older patient with depression. How much does their physical stamina affect their risk of dying? How hard should you push physical activity to prevent the development of frailty on top of their depression? The answer appears to be, a lot.
Hi! Jim Phelps here for the Psychopharmacology Institute. This Quick Take begins with a recent paper on frailty in depressed older adults. For research purposes, frailty is defined as having 3 or 5 features—weight loss, weakness, exhaustion, slowness, and low physical activity. Another scale is broader, with 10 features including cognition, functional independence, social support, continence, and mobility. Either way, high frailty scores are statistically associated with morbidity and mortality. Geriatric depression is also associated with mortality, but since frailty and depression have common features like motor slowness, fatigue, weight loss and feelings of exhaustion, it’s difficult to tease them apart.
Dr. Matheus Arts and colleagues
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