Frailty prevalence in hospitalized older adults. A systematic review.

BACKGROUND Theres is uncertain evidence regarding the prevalence, measurement tools, outcomes, and efficacy of the interventions on frailty in hospitalized older adults. For this reason, we present the results of a systematic review about Frailty and Hospital, following the PRISMA methodology. METHODS We found 2,050 articles published in PubMed. After an initial assessment of titles and abstracts, complete comprehensive text lecture, and meta-analysis review, we finally included in the systematic review 246 originals. RESULTS The main result of the systematic review is that from the 246 articles, 179 described frailty prevalence in hospital older adults, with a pooled prevalence of 41.4% (95% CI 38.4% to 44.4%; range 4.7% to 92.5%). The most frequent type of studies were those observational prospectives 166 (67.5%), being the rest observtcional retrospectives or cross-sectional 64 (26.2%) or randomized clinical trials 15 (6.1%). The most frequent healthcare levels where the studies took place were the Hospital/Hospitalization in 125 (50.8%), Geriatric Department in 41 (16.7%), Surgical Units in 23 (9.3%), Cardiology Department in 18 (7.3%), Emergency Department in 15 (6.1%), and other in 24 (9.8%). The most frequent used measurement tolos were the Clinical Frailty Scale in 69 works (28%), the frailty phenotype in 41 (15.9%), the Frailty Index in 39 (15.9%) and the FRAIL scale in 27 (11.0%). In several papers, more than one instrument was used, and in many of them, scales and cut-off points were arbitrarely determined, producing a great results heterogeneity. CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of frailty in hospitalized older adults is very high. It is necessary to improve frailty measure homogenity and to realize randomized clinical trials in this population.