Clinical Frailty in Intensive Care Units: Prevalence and Associated Factors.
Hilal Arslan, Hatice Demirdağ
PMID 42638294WHAT IT FOUND
In 149 adult ICU patients, 82.6% were frail within 24 hours.
Frailty was linked to older age, male sex, higher APACHE II and nutritional risk, and death. This helps ICU nurses flag high-risk patients, but it is not a tested intervention.
Key findings
01In 149 ICU patients, 82.6% were frail within 24 hours, defined as a Clinical Frailty Scale score of 5 or higher.
02Frailty scores were significantly higher in patients who died than in those discharged alive, and 61.7% of patients died during the study.
03In logistic regression, male sex, APACHE II score, Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 score and age were independent predictors of frailty, with men having 2.96 times higher odds of frailty than women.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was done in one centre, so the results may not apply to other ICUs. It included only medical ICU patients who stayed more than 24 hours. Trauma patients, surgical admissions and very short stays were excluded, so the sample was not a general ICU population. The sample was older and clinically severe, so the 82.6% frailty rate may reflect a selected group rather than all ICU patients. Frailty was assessed only with the Clinical Frailty Scale, and the nurse doing the assessment had no specific training beyond reading the literature. The study followed patients only to ICU discharge or death, so it does not show long-term function or quality of life. Because it was observational, it shows association, not cause.
Declared interests
No funding was reported, and the authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 82.6% frailty rate as a general ICU prevalence or as proof that frailty causes death. The study was single-centre, included only medical ICU patients who stayed more than 24 hours, and measured association rather than treatment effect.