Bedside to Bench: From Frailty to Muscle Regeneration

Clinical importance of frailty on outcomes has been studied for the last decade in South Korea. Initially, operational concept of frailty has been validated, and then studies have been focused on comprehensive assessment of frailty in geriatric field. Afterwards, many brief tools which can screen frailty in various clinical settings have been developed, opening door to widespread access on frailty assessment. By these historical emergence of frailty assessment in clinical medicine, many clinicians and researchers other than geriatricians started to incorporate the concept of frailty in their field. Firstly, adoption and expansion of frailty research in clinical medicine connects geriatrics with many other specialties including surgeries, cardiology, and oncology, which deal with serious conditions commonly occurs in older people. Many observational studies showed that frailty in these people can lead to severe adverse events which might be unexpected with chronological age or traditional risk models. Therefore, assessing frailty status and modifying therapeutic strategy has become an important issue in many common conditions in older people. Furthermore, studies even started to include pre- or post-treatment prevention of frailty or functional decline in surgery field. Also, studies on frailty is becoming more systematic and large-scaled, with support of nationwide public health care system. In the past, observational and interventional studies on frailty has been confined in small sized community or geriatric clinic. Evidences from these studies lead to the nationwide efforts to develop guidelines to prevent frailty in older people. Lastly, concept of frailty which started as operational criteria in older people started to expand to preclinical and translational biomedicine researches. Researchers are developing tools to assess frailty in animals including rodents, and also establishing animal models with features of frailty. Preclinical research platforms from these efforts will provide tools to validate efficacy and mechanisms of specific therapeutic intervention on frailty. Since frailty is rather recently suggested clinical concept, there are many unanswered questions. Nevertheless, since there is ever inrrpASinn demand for the prevention and treatment of frailty, clinical and preclinical studies on frailty in the future will continue to expand.

Recorded During the Keystone Symposia Conference on

Regenerative Biology and Applications: Cell Differentiation, Tissue Organization and Biomedical Engineering (T3)

Oct 15-19, 2017 | Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

This Keystone Symposia SciTalk was made possible by a grant from the Croucher Foundation and The University of Hong Kong.