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Introduction: With increasing proportion of the elderly in the world, detecting and preventing frailty assumes importance to improve the quality of life and health. The study aimed to estimate the prevalence of frailty, disability and its determinants and their relation with mortality among community dwelling elderly cohort. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted in a cohort in rural Haryana, India, and was followed till October 2018. Frailty was assessed using the Edmonton Frailty Scale and disability was assessed using the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule 2.0 (WHODAS 2.0) scale by trained physicians. Results: The prevalence of frailty was found to be 47.3% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 44.0-50.8). The median WHODAS-2 score was found to be 10.4 (2.1-29.2). Those who were older (odds ratio [OR] - 2.5; 95% CI: 1.8-3.4), women (OR - 3.3; 95% CI: 2.2-4.9) and those with chronic disease (OR 2.3; 95% CI: 1.7-3.1) had higher rates of frailty. The adjusted hazard ratio of death among frail people was 4.7 (2.3-9.7). Conclusion: In this study we found the frailty is associated with the mortality among community dwelling elderly. Thus early identification of the frailty and its determinants may help us to reduce the mortality related to this [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sore throat is one of the commonest symptoms that patients present to a primary care physician. We describe the epidemiology of sore throat and performance of an algorithm to predict viral sore throat in a part of India. Methods: Children below 10 years of age were followed in 4 villages of Haryana, India from Aug 2012 to Aug 2014 through weekly domiciliary visits by trained field workers who screened for symptoms of acute respiratory infection (ARI) including sore throat. Nasal and throat swabs were obtained from a random sample of sore throat cases by nurses and sent in appropriate transport media for real-time polymerase chain reaction for detection of viral nucleic acid. Incidence of sore throat and viral sore throat are reported as number of sore throat episodes per 1000 child-years (EPTCY) with 95% confidence-interval (CI). Symptoms, associated with viral sore throat were identified by logistic regression, combined into a clinical score and Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was plotted. Results: Over a two-year period, 3765 children were followed up for 5578 child years. 1069 episodes of sore throat were reported, and swabs were collected from 8% of the cases randomly. The incidence of sore throat and viral sore throat was 191.7 (95%CI: 180.5-203.6) and 60.1 (95%CI: 55.1-68.2) EPTCY, respectively. Fever (aOR 5.40,95%CI: 1.16-25.18) and running nose (aOR 10.16,95%CI: 1.01-102.42) was significantly associated with viral sore throat. The clinical score (fever, running nose, and headache) had an overall sensitivity of 86.2% (68.3-96.1%), specificity of 62% (47.2-75.3%) and AUC of 0.78 (0.67-0.87) in predicting viral sore throat. Conclusion: Viruses contributed to one-third of burden of sore throat and clinical score can be used in primary care settings to aid antibiotic prescription by physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]