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Inflammatory Markers and Frailty

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Handbook of Immunosenescence

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Abstract

Frailty has been recognized as an important geriatric syndrome characterized by decreased functional and physiologic reserve with multi-system dysregulation, increased vulnerability to stressors, and high risk for serious adverse health outcomes. Two models have widely been utilized for screening and identifying frail older adults in many different clinical settings with numerous variations described in the literature. Frailty phenotype defines frailty as a distinct clinical syndrome meeting three or more of the five phenotypic criteria: weakness, slowness, low level of physical activity, exhaustion, and unintentional weight loss. Frailty index defines frailty as cumulative deficits identified in comprehensive geriatrics assessment. Chronic inflammation marked by elevated levels of inflammatory and immune activation markers, above and beyond age-related changes, is considered to play a key role in the pathogenesis of frailty. This chapter will provide an overview of frailty and its relationship with several molecular and cellular markers of chronic inflammation and immune activation, including interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, other pro-inflammatory molecules, as well as white blood cell and its specific subpopulations. It will also present emerging evidence for inflammatory pathway activation in frail older adults and a brief discussion about the role of chronic inflammation, directly and/or indirectly through other intermediary pathophysiologic processes, in contributing to frailty.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by an NIH grant R01AI108907 and funding from the Milstein Medical Asian American Partnership (MMAAP) Foundation (www.mmaapf.org) to Dr. Sean X. Leng. Dr. Haiyan Zhang is an Irma and Paul Milstein Program for Senior Health fellow supported by the MMAAP Foundation (www.mmaapf.org).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology and Center on Aging and Health, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Sean X. Leng

  2. Department of Geriatrics, China Medical University First Affiliated Hospital, Shenyang, China

    Haiyan Zhang

  3. Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Linda P. Fried

Authors
  1. Sean X. Leng
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  2. Haiyan Zhang
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  3. Linda P. Fried
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sean X. Leng .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Geriatrics Research Center on Aging, University of Sherbrooke Dept. of Medicine, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada

    Tamas Fulop

  2. Dept of Experimental Pathology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Claudio Franceschi

  3. Institute for Health and Life Sciences, Tokyo, Japan

    Katsuiku Hirokawa

  4. Center for Medical Research, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Graham Pawelec

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Leng, S.X., Zhang, H., Fried, L.P. (2019). Inflammatory Markers and Frailty. In: Fulop, T., Franceschi, C., Hirokawa, K., Pawelec, G. (eds) Handbook of Immunosenescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64597-1_62-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64597-1_62-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64597-1

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