‘Social frailty’ comes with health risks similar to physical frailty, research finds

Researchers have found that older adults who are don’t have close relationships, can’t rely on others for help, aren’t active in community groups or religious organizations or live in neighborhoods that feel unsafe have less physiological strength and a reduced biological ability to bounce back from illness or injury (Source: “Being ‘Socially Frail’ Comes With Health Risks for Older Adults,” Kaiser Health News, March 23). 
 
Many of these factors have been linked to poor health outcomes later in life, and are compounded by social drivers of health such as low socioeconomic status, poor nutrition, insecure housing and inaccessible transportation.
 
Social frailty assumes that each factor contributes to an older person’s vulnerability and that they interact with and build upon each other. This way of thinking about older adults’ social lives, and how they influence health outcomes, is getting new attention from experts in the U.S. and elsewhere. In February, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California-San Francisco published a 10-item “social frailty index” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
 
Using data from 8,250 adults 65 and older who participated in the national Health and Retirement Study from 2010 to 2016, the researchers found that the index helped predict an increased risk of death during the period studied in a significant number of older adults, complementing medical tools used for this purpose.