ArticleFrontiers in medicine2024
The vicious cycle of frailty and pain: a two-sided causal relationship revealed.
Article in Frontiers in medicine, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Frailty and Incident Low Back Pain in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Longitudinal Evidence and Genetic Triangulation.Journal of pain research · 2026Article
- Mediation of the frailty index, the relationship between sleep duration and chronic pain in different body regions: insights from the CHARLS cross-sectional study.Journal of orthopaedic surgery and research · 2025Article
- Multi-Polygenic prediction of Frailty and its Trajectories highlights Chronic Pain, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Educational Attainment pathways.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: The decline in physiological functions in the older people is frequently accompanied with pain and frailty, yet the causal connection between frailty and pain remains uncertain. In this study, we utilized a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) approach to investigate the potential causal association between frailty and pain. Methods: Two-sample bidirectional MR was conducted using summary data from genome-wide association studies to examine the potential causal relationship between frailty (defined by the frailty index and frailty phenotype) and pain. Summary genome wide association statistics were extracted from populations of European ancestry. We also investigated the causal relationship between frailty and site-specific pain, including joint pain, limb pain, thoracic spine pain and low back pain. Causal effects were estimated using the inverse variance weighting method. Sensitivity analyses were performed to validate the robustness of the results. Results: Genetic predisposition to frailty was associated with an increased risk of pain (frailty phenotype odds ratio [OR]: 1.73; Conclusion: This study presented evidence supporting a bidirectional causal relationship between frailty and pain. We highlighted the significance of addressing pain to prevent frailty and recommend the inclusion of pain assessment in the evaluation system for frailty.
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Registered trials
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