It’s a syndrome recognized by medical professionals as a major risk factor for a sudden worsening in health—people who score high on measures of frailty are more likely to develop complications after routine surgeries and to decline swiftly after infections or falls. Signs of frailty include a slow walking speed and taking a while to perform what’s called a “timed up-and-go test,” where someone gets up from a chair, walks a few paces, then heads back to sit down. (If this takes more than about 13 seconds, that’s a possible marker of frailty). Researchers believe that exercise can help reverse the condition.
A new trial published in the journal PLOS ONE found that people who walked fast were more likely to improve their frailty scores than those who strolled at a leisurely pace, although both groups saw benefits. Encouraging older people to take it slowly might sound like reasonable advice, says Margaret Danilovich, a physical therapist and instructor at Northwestern University and an author of the new paper. "People tend to assume, ‘Someone is frail.
We shouldn't have them do too much,’” she says. But, she says, that’s a miscalculation, and older folks are capable of more than they might think. In the current study, she and her colleagues set up exercise groups in 14 retirement homes.
Research assistants assessed people’s frailty before and after the intervention and coached them during several months of weekly walking sessions in the retirement community hallways. Each group performed similar walking tasks—walking forward, backward, with walkers and without—but half of them walked casually, while the others were encouraged to walk much faster. However, more people dropped out of the high-intensity group than out of the casual group, points out Dr.
Kenneth Rockwood, a professor of medicine at Dalhousie University in Canada (who was not involved with the study). But any quality research in this field is welcome, he added. We need a bunch more of that.” (The researchers found there were no baseline health differences between the groups, suggesting that it’s reasonable to infer that it wasn’t just people in worse shape who dropped out, leaving fitter participants behind.) The results are particularly interesting because they suggest that high-intensity exercise can be safe for this population, says Dr.
Sara Espinoza, a geriatrician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (who was not involved in the research). There was only one fall during the study, suggesting that exercise might not be as dangerous among older adults as people tend to assume. Espinoza cautions that implementing the findings might be difficult.
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