ArticleBiogerontology2013
Assessing biological aging: the origin of deficit accumulation.
Article in Biogerontology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Frailty and mortality associations in patients with COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Internal medicine journal · 2022Pooled it
- A systematic review of the evidence that brain structure is related to muscle structure and their relationship to brain and muscle function in humans over the lifecourse.BMC geriatrics · 2014Pooled it
- Psychological and Social Factors Associated with Coexisting Frailty and Cognitive Impairment: A Systematic Review.Research on agingPooled it
- Does lifestyle intervention lower clinically significant cognitive impairment risk?Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Trial
- Frailty Change and Major Osteoporotic Fracture in the Elderly: Data from the Global Longitudinal Study of Osteoporosis in Women 3-Year Hamilton Cohort.Journal of bone and mineral research : the official journal of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research · 2016Trial
- Screening for markers of frailty and perceived risk of adverse outcomes using the Risk Instrument for Screening in the Community (RISC).BMC geriatrics · 2014Trial
- Embracing non-linearity in human ageing.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Review
- FI-CGA and eFI-CGA in Frailty Care: a Scoping Review.Canadian geriatrics journal : CGJ · 2026Review
- Patients' Attitudes Towards Deprescribing and Associations With Patient-Related Factors Across Two Hospital Settings.Basic & clinical pharmacology & toxicology · 2026Article
- Neural embedding of frailty in cognitively unimpaired aging and dementia across Latin America.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Enhancing patient stratification methods for medication review during acute admissions.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2025Article
- Longitudinal Patterns of Multimorbidity in Gulf War Era Veterans With and Without Gulf War Illness.Journal of aging and health · 2025Article
- Relationship Between Frailty and Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Hospitalized Older Adults.Open forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Association of 3-year change in frailty index with risk of all-cause mortality among older Chinese population: a national cohort study.BMC geriatrics · 2024Article
- Association between frailty index based on laboratory tests and all-cause mortality in critically ill patients with heart failure.ESC heart failure · 2024Observational
- Frailty in Critically Ill Patients with COVID-19: The Lessons Learned.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2024Review
- Review
- Prognostic significance of frailty in hospitalized elderly patients with community-acquired pneumonia: a retrospective cohort study.BMC geriatrics · 2023Article
- Genetic and Environmental Influences on Longitudinal Frailty Trajectories From Adulthood into Old Age.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2023Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The health of individuals is highly heterogeneous, as is the rate at which they age. To account for such heterogeneity, we have suggested that an individual's health status can be represented by the number of health deficits (broadly defined by biological and clinical characteristics) that they accumulate. This allows health to be expressed in a single number: the frailty index (FI) is the ratio of the deficits present in a person to the total number of deficits considered (e.g. in a given database or experimental procedure). Changes in the FI characterize the rate of individual aging. The behavior of the FI is highly characteristic: it shows an age specific, nonlinear increase, (similar to Gompertz law), higher values in females, strong associations with adverse outcomes (e.g., mortality), and a universal limit to its increase (at FI ~0.7). These features have been demonstrated in dozens of studies. Even so, little is known about the origin of deficit accumulation. Here, we apply a stochastic dynamics framework to illustrate that the average number of deficits present in an individual is the product of the average intensity of the environmental stresses and the average recovery time. The age-associated increase in recovery time results in the accumulation of deficits. This not only explains why the number of deficits can be used to estimate individual differences in aging rates, but also suggests that targeting the recovery rate (e.g. by preventive or therapeutic interventions) will decrease the number of deficits that individuals accumulate and thereby benefit life expectancy.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.