ReviewBritish journal of clinical pharmacology2025
Frailty in clinical drug trials: Frailty assessments, subgroup analyses and outcomes.
Review in British journal of clinical pharmacology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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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
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Clinical Trials in Older Adults with Cardiovascular Multimorbidity: A Perspective on Pragmatic Trial Design.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- Simulation study of frailty as a baseline confounder: the need to improve reporting intensive care trials.Critical care (London, England) · 2026Review
- Frailty and stroke: Global implications for assessment, research, and clinical care-A WSO scientific statement.International journal of stroke : official journal of the International Stroke Society · 2025Review
- Frailty in clinical drug trials: Frailty assessments, subgroup analyses and outcomes.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2025Review
- The Role of Frailty in Cardio-oncology and its Challenges.European cardiology · 2025Review
- A Look at Primary and Secondary Prevention in the Elderly: The Two Sides of the Same Coin.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Review
- The ethics of frailty: a need for consensus guidelines.The journal of nutrition, health & aging · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
With population ageing, drug trials are increasingly turning their attention to including older, frailer people. This review aimed to provide an overview of how frailty was assessed in published studies related to clinical pharmacological trials, and on the interaction of frailty on the efficacy of the treatments. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane for clinical drug trials in older people. A total of 4031 abstracts were screened and 17 relevant studies were included in this review. We summarized the findings of these 17 trials into five main clinical areas: cardiovascular (eight studies), cognition (one study), vaccination (two studies), cancer (four studies) and other (two studies). Frailty was assessed retrospectively in most of the studies. Frailty was treated as an ordinal variable (with different levels of frailty) or binary variable (frail/non-frail) using cut-offs in some studies, and as a continuous in some other studies. The effect of frailty on the treatment efficacy was not consistent among the studies. While several trials, such as the Action in Diabetes and Vascular Disease-Preterax and Diamicron Modified Release Controlled Evaluation trials, the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial and the Aspirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly trial, showed some reduced effects of the treatment in frail patients, most of the trials showed that the benefits of the treatment are not affected by frailty. Some trials even showed that the benefits of the treatment were more significant in frailer patients (the Dapagliflozin and Prevention of Adverse Outcomes in Heart Failure and the Dapagliflozin Evaluation to Improve the Lives of Patients with Preserved Ejection Fraction Heart Failure trials). The results of this review suggest that routine measurement of frailty in participants in clinical drug trials would improve our knowledge of the effect of treatment in the frail and identify those who have more or least to gain from treatment.
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