Deficit-Accumulation Frailty Index
The deficit-accumulation frailty index measures frailty as the proportion of a long list of age-related health deficits that a person has accumulated. Introduced by Arnold Mitnitski and Kenneth Rockwood in 2001, it treats frailty not as a fixed syndrome but as a quantitative state: the more things have gone wrong across many body systems, the frailer the person. Counting 30 or more deficits — symptoms, signs, diseases, disabilities, and laboratory abnormalities — and dividing by the number considered yields a continuous score between 0 and 1 that rises with age, predicts mortality and adverse outcomes, and behaves remarkably consistently regardless of exactly which deficits are used. A standardized procedure by Searle and colleagues made the index easy to construct from existing data.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Mitnitski, A. B., Mogilner, A. J., & Rockwood, K. (2001). Accumulation of deficits as a proxy measure of aging. The Scientific World Journal, 1, 323-336. · DOI 10.1100/tsw.2001.58
- Searle, S. D., Mitnitski, A., Gahbauer, E. A., Gill, T. M., & Rockwood, K. (2008). A standard procedure for creating a frailty index. BMC Geriatrics, 8, 24. · DOI 10.1186/1471-2318-8-24
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