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Aging with HIV poses unique and complex challenges, including avoidance of neurocognitive disorder. Our objective here is to identify the prevalence and predictors of successful cognitive aging (SCA) in a sample of older adults with HIV. One hundred three HIV-infected individuals aged 50 and older were recruited from the Modena HIV Metabolic Clinic in Italy. Participants were treated with combination antiretroviral therapy for at least 1 year and had suppressed plasma HIV viral load. SCA was defined as the absence of neurocognitive impairment (as defined by deficits in tasks of episodic learning, information processing speed, executive function, and motor skills) depression, and functional impairment (instrumental activities of daily living). In cross-sectional analyses, odds of SCA were assessed in relation to HIV-related clinical data, HIV-Associated Non-AIDS (HANA) conditions, multimorbidity (≥2HANA conditions), and frailty. A frailty index was calculated as the number of deficits present out of 37 health variables. SCA was identified in 38.8% of participants. Despite no differences in average chronologic age between groups, SCA participants had significantly fewer HANA conditions, a lower frailty index, and were less likely to have hypertension. In addition, hypertension (odds ratio [OR] = 0.40, p = .04), multimorbidity (OR = 0.35, p = .05), and frailty (OR = 0.64, p = .04) were significantly associated with odds of SCA. Frailty is associated with the likelihood of SCA in people living with HIV. This defines an opportunity to apply knowledge from geriatric population research to people aging with HIV to better appreciate the complexity of their health status.

Introduction: Foot problems are common among homeless persons, but are often overlooked. The objectives of this systematic review are to summarize what is known about foot conditions and associated interventions among homeless persons., Methods: A literature search was conducted on MEDLINE (1966-2016), EMBASE (1947-2016), and CINAHL (1982-2016) and complemented by manual searches of reference lists. Articles that described foot conditions in homeless persons or associated interventions were included. Data were independently extracted on: general study characteristics; participants; foot assessment methods; foot conditions and associated interventions; study findings; quality score assessed using the Downs and Black checklist., Results: Of 333 articles screened, 17 articles met criteria and were included in the study. Prevalence of any foot problem ranged from 9% to 65% across study populations. Common foot-related concerns were corns and calluses, nail pathologies, and infections. Foot pathologies related to chronic diseases such as diabetes were identified. Compared to housed individuals across studies, homeless individuals were more likely to have foot problems including tinea pedis, foot pain, functional limitations with walking, and improperly-fitting shoes., Discussion: Foot conditions were highly prevalent among homeless individuals with up to two thirds reporting a foot health concern, approximately one quarter of individuals visiting a health professional, and one fifth of individuals requiring further follow-up due to the severity of their condition. Homeless individuals often had inadequate foot hygiene practices and improperly-fitting shoes. These findings have service provision and public health implications, highlighting the need for evidence-based interventions to improve foot health in this population. An effective interventional approach could include optimization of foot hygiene and footwear, provision of comprehensive medical treatment, and addressing social factors that lead to increased risk of foot problems. Targeted efforts to screen for and treat foot problems could result in improved health and social outcomes for homeless individuals., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests.

Objectives: Aging with HIV is associated with multisystem vulnerability that might be well characterized by frailty. We sought to construct a frailty index based on health deficit accumulation in a large HIV clinical cohort and evaluate its validity including the ability to predict mortality and incident multimorbidity., Design and Methods: This is an analysis of data from the prospective Modena HIV Metabolic Clinic cohort, 2004-2014. Routine health variables were screened for potential inclusion in a frailty index. Content, construct, and criterion validity of the frailty index were assessed. Multivariable regression models were built to investigate the ability of the frailty index to predict survival and incident multimorbidity (at least two chronic disease diagnoses) after adjusting for known HIV-related and behavioral factors., Results: Two thousand, seven hundred and twenty participants (mean age 46 ± 8; 32% women) provided 9784 study visits; 37 non-HIV-related variables were included in a frailty index. The frailty index exhibited expected characteristics and met validation criteria. Predictors of survival were frailty index (0.1 increment, adjusted hazard ratio 1.63, 95% confidence interval 1.05-2.52), current CD4 cell count (0.48, 0.32-0.72), and injection drug use (2.51, 1.16-5.44). Predictors of incident multimorbidity were frailty index (adjusted incident rate ratio 1.98, 1.65-2.36), age (1.07, 1.05-1.09), female sex (0.61, 0.40-0.91), and current CD4 cell count (0.71, 0.59-0.85)., Conclusion: Among people aging with HIV in northern Italy, a frailty index based on deficit accumulation predicted survival and incident multimorbidity independently of HIV-related and behavioral risk factors. The frailty index holds potential value in quantifying vulnerability among people aging with HIV.

We conducted a systematic review to determine variability in how the criteria of the frailty phenotype (grip strength, weight loss, exhaustion, walking speed, physical activity) were assessed. We then evaluated the impact on estimating prevalence and mortality of modifying the criteria, using the Survey of Health, Ageing, & Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Five databases were searched for original research articles published after 2000, which evaluated frailty using the phenotypic criteria. Among the 264 included studies, 24 studies provided enough information to demonstrate that all criteria were assessed as proposed in the original frailty phenotype study by Fried et al. (2001). Physical inactivity and weight loss were the criteria most often modified. We then created 262 phenotypes from SHARE based on common modifications found in the review. Among these phenotypes, frailty prevalence ranged from 12.7% to 28.2%. Agreement with the primary frailty phenotype ranged from 0.662 to 0.967 and internal consistency ranged from 0.430 to 0.649. Women had 2.1-16.3% higher frailty prevalence than men. Areas under receiver operating characteristic curves for discriminating five-year mortality ranged from 0.607 (95% CI: 0.583-0.630) to 0.668 (0.645-0.691). The frailty phenotype often has been modified, and these modifications have important impact on its classification and predictive ability., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: People aging with HIV might have different health conditions compared with people who seroconverted at older ages. The study objective was to assess the prevalence of, and risk factors for, individual co-morbidities and multimorbidity (MM) between HIV-positive patients with a longer duration of HIV infection, and patients who seroconverted at an older age. We compared estimates across both groups to a matched community-based cohort sampled from the general population., Methods: We performed a case-control study including antiretroviral therapy (ART)-experienced patients who were HIV seropositive for ≥ 20.6 years ("HIV-Aging"), or who were seropositive for < 11.3 years ("HIV-Aged") having access in 2013 at the Modena HIV Metabolic Clinic. Patients were matched in a 1:3 ratio with controls from the CINECA ARNO database. MM was defined as the concurrent presence of >2 NICM. Logistic regression models were constructed to evaluate associated predictors of NICM and MM., Results: We analysed 404 HIV-Aging and 404 HIV-Aged participants in comparison to 2424 controls. The mean age was 46.7 ± 6.2 years, 28.9% were women. Prevalence of HIV co-morbidities and MM were significantly higher in the HIV-positive groups compared to the general population (p<0.001) and a trend towards higher rates of MM was found in aging vs aged group. This difference turned to be significant in patients above the age of 45 years old (p<0.001)., Conclusions: People aging with HIV display heterogeneous health conditions. Host factors and duration of HIV infection are associated with increased risk of MM compared to the general population.

The increasing life spans of people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reflect enormous treatment successes and present new challenges related to aging. Even with suppression of viral loads and immune reconstitution, HIV-positive individuals exhibit excess vulnerability to multiple health problems that are not AIDS-defining. With the accumulation of multiple health problems, it is likely that many people aging with treated HIV infection may be identified as frail. Studies of frailty in people with HIV are currently limited but suggest that frailty might be feasible and useful as an integrative marker of multisystem vulnerability, for organizing care and for comprehensively measuring the impact of illness and treatment on overall health status. This review explains how frailty has been conceptualized and measured in the general population, critically reviews emerging data on frailty in people with HIV infection, and explores how the concept of frailty might inform HIV research and care., (© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Background: Life course influences, including country of residence and country of birth, are associated with frailty index scores. We investigated these associations using performance-based health measures., Methods: Among 33,745 participants age 50+ (mean age 64.8 ± 10.1; 55% women) in the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, grip strength, delayed word recall, and semantic verbal fluency were assessed. Participants were grouped by country of residence (Northern/Western Europe or Southern/Eastern Europe), and by country of birth (native-born, immigrants born in low- and middle-income countries [LMICs], or immigrants born in high-income countries [HICs])., Results: Participants in Southern/Eastern Europe had lower mean test scores than those in Northern/Western Europe, and their scores did not differ by country of birth group. In Northern/Western Europe, compared with native-born participants, LMIC-born immigrants demonstrated lower mean grip strength (32.8 ± 7.6 kg vs. 35.7 ± 7.7 kg), delayed recall (2.9 ± 1.9 vs. 3.6 ± 1.9), and verbal fluency scores (16.0 ± 6.9 vs. 20.3 ± 7.0). HIC-born immigrants had mean scores higher than LMIC-born immigrants, but lower than native-born participants (all p<.001)., Conclusions: Cognitive and motor performance, measured from late middle age, were associated with national income levels of both country of residence and country of birth. This was similar to previously observed differences in frailty index scores.

Purpose of Review: Effective therapies have transformed HIV infection into a chronic disease, and new problems are arising related to aging. This article reviews the aging process, age-related deficit accumulation and frailty, and how these might be affected by chronic HIV infection., Recent Findings: Aging is characterized by acceleration in the rate of unrepaired physiologic damage an organism accumulates. HIV infection is associated with many factors that might affect the aging process, including extrinsic behavioral risk factors and co-infections, and multiple intrinsic factors, including intercellular communication, inflammation, and coagulation pathways. Whether each factor affects the aging process, they likely result in an increase in the risk of adverse health outcomes, and so give rise to frailty, likely with several clinical manifestations., Summary: Age-related deficit accumulation is influenced by both the background or environmental rate of insults an organism sustains and the efficacy of intrinsic damage control and repair mechanisms. Both processes are likely affected in people living with HIV infection.

Objectives: To determine whether commonly used frailty scales exhibit shared characteristics when applied to a representative sample of middle-aged and older Europeans., Design: Secondary analysis of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)., Setting: Eleven European countries., Participants: Community-dwelling adults (N = 27,527; mean age 65.3 ± 10.5, 55% female)., Measurements: Frailty was assessed using SHARE-operationalized versions of seven frailty scales: Edmonton Frail Scale, FRAIL scale, Groningen Frailty Indicator, frailty phenotype, Tilburg Frailty Indicator, a 70-item frailty index (FI), and a 44-item frailty index based on Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment., Results: All frailty scales demonstrated right-skewed density distributions. On all scales, frailty scores increased nonlinearly with age, between 1% (FRAIL) and 3.6% (FI) per year on a log scale. Frailty scores on all scales exhibited dose-response relationships with 5-year mortality. On all scales, women had higher frailty scores than men of the same age but demonstrated better survival than did men with the same frailty score. On all scales except the frailty phenotype, 99% of participants had scores below the scale's theoretical maximum., Conclusion: On each frailty scale, frailty score increased nonlinearly with age, mortality risk increased with frailty score, and women had higher scores than men but demonstrated better survival. Each scale except the frailty phenotype demonstrated an upper limit to frailty below the scale's theoretical maximum. Across commonly used frailty scales, these characteristics are common in nature but differ in magnitude., (© 2014, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation © 2014, The American Geriatrics Society.)

Background: The frailty index (FI) is used to measure the health status of ageing individuals. An FI is constructed as the proportion of deficits present in an individual out of the total number of age-related health variables considered. The purpose of this study was to systematically assess whether dichotomizing deficits included in an FI affects the information value of the whole index., Methods: Secondary analysis of three population-based longitudinal studies of community dwelling individuals: Nova Scotia Health Survey (NSHS, n = 3227 aged 18+), Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, n = 37546 aged 50+), and Yale Precipitating Events Project (Yale-PEP, n = 754 aged 70+). For each dataset, we constructed two FIs from baseline data using the deficit accumulation approach. In each dataset, both FIs included the same variables (23 in NSHS, 70 in SHARE, 33 in Yale-PEP). One FI was constructed with only dichotomous values (marking presence or absence of a deficit); in the other FI, as many variables as possible were coded as ordinal (graded severity of a deficit). Participants in each study were followed for different durations (NSHS: 10 years, SHARE: 5 years, Yale PEP: 12 years)., Results: Within each dataset, the difference in mean scores between the ordinal and dichotomous-only FIs ranged from 0 to 1.5 deficits. Their ability to predict mortality was identical; their absolute difference in area under the ROC curve ranged from 0.00 to 0.02, and their absolute difference between Cox Hazard Ratios ranged from 0.001 to 0.009., Conclusions: Analyses from three diverse datasets suggest that variables included in an FI can be coded either as dichotomous or ordinal, with negligible impact on the performance of the index in predicting mortality.

We evaluated life course influences on health by investigating potential differences in levels of frailty between middle-aged and older European immigrants born in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), immigrants born in high income countries (HICs), and their native-born European peers. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we constructed a frailty index from 70 age-related health measures for 33,745 participants aged 50+ (mean=64.9 ± 10.2 years; 54% women) in 14 European countries. Participants were grouped as native-born or as immigrants born in LMICs or in HICs, and further by current residence in Northern/Western or Southern/Eastern Europe. Seven percent of participants (n=2369) were immigrants (mean=64.4 ± 10.2 years; 56% women; LMIC-born=3.4%, HIC-born=3.6%). In Northern/Western Europe, after adjustment for age, gender, and education, LMIC-born immigrants demonstrated higher frailty index scores (mean=0.18, 95% confidence interval=0.17-0.19) than both HIC-born immigrants (0.16, 0.16-0.17) and native-born participants (0.15, 0.14-0.15 both p<0.001). In Southern/Eastern Europe, frailty index scores did not differ between groups (p=0.2). Time since migration explained significant variance in frailty index scores only in HIC-born immigrants to Southern/Eastern Europe (4.3%, p=0.03). Despite differences in frailty, survival did not differ between groups (p=0.2). LMIC-born immigrants demonstrated higher levels of frailty in Northern/Western Europe, but not Southern/Eastern Europe. Country of birth and current country of residence were each associated with frailty. Life course influences are demonstrable, but complex., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: To operationalize frailty using eight scales and to compare their content validity, feasibility, prevalence estimates of frailty, and ability to predict all-cause mortality., Design: Secondary analysis of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)., Setting: Eleven European countries., Participants: Individuals aged 50 to 104 (mean age 65.3 ± 10.5, 54.8% female, N = 27,527)., Measurements: Frailty was operationalized using SHARE data based on the Groningen Frailty Indicator, the Tilburg Frailty Indicator, a 70-item Frailty Index (FI), a 44-item FI based on a Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (FI-CGA), the Clinical Frailty Scale, frailty phenotype (weighted and unweighted versions), the Edmonton Frail Scale, and the FRAIL scale., Results: All scales had fewer than 6% of cases with at least one missing item, except the SHARE-frailty phenotype (11.1%) and the SHARE-Tilburg (12.2%). In the SHARE-Groningen, SHARE-Tilburg, SHARE-frailty phenotype, and SHARE-FRAIL scales, death rates were 3 to 5 times as high in excluded cases as in included ones. Frailty prevalence estimates ranged from 6% (SHARE-FRAIL) to 44% (SHARE-Groningen). All scales categorized 2.4% of participants as frail. Of unweighted scales, the SHARE-FI and SHARE-Edmonton scales most accurately predicted mortality at 2 (SHARE-FI area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) = 0.77, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.75-0.79); SHARE-Edmonton AUC = 0.76, 95% CI = 0.74-0.79) and 5 (both AUC = 0.75, 95% CI = 0.74-0.77) years. The continuous score of the weighted SHARE-frailty phenotype (AUC = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.75-0.78) predicted 5-year mortality better than the unweighted SHARE-frailty phenotype (AUC = 0.70, 95% CI = 0.68-0.71), but the categorical score of the weighted SHARE-frailty phenotype did not (AUC = 0.70, 95% CI = 0.68-0.72)., Conclusion: Substantive differences exist between scales in their content validity, feasibility, and ability to predict all-cause mortality. These frailty scales capture related but distinct groups. Weighting items in frailty scales can improve their predictive ability, but the trade-off between specificity, predictive power, and generalizability requires additional evaluation., (© 2013, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation © 2013, The American Geriatrics Society.)

Background: on an individual level, lower-income has been associated with disability, morbidity and death. On a population level, the relationship of economic indicators with health is unclear., Objective: the purpose of this study was to evaluate relative fitness and frailty in relation to national income and healthcare spending, and their relationship with mortality., Design and Setting: secondary analysis of data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE); a longitudinal population-based survey which began in 2004., Subjects: a total of 36,306 community-dwelling people aged 50 and older (16,467 men; 19,839 women) from the 15 countries which participated in the SHARE comprised the study sample. A frailty index was constructed as the proportion of deficits present in relation to the 70 deficits available in SHARE. The characteristics of the frailty index examined were mean, prevalence of frailty and proportion of the fittest group., Results: the mean value of the frailty index was lower in higher-income countries (0.16 ± 0.12) than in lower-income countries (0.20 ± 0.14); the overall mean frailty index was negatively correlated with both gross domestic product (r = -0.79; P < 0.01) and health expenditure (r = -0.63; P < 0.05). Survival in non-frail participants at 24 months was not associated with national income (P = 0.19), whereas survival in frail people was greater in higher-income countries (P < 0.05)., Conclusions: a country's level of frailty and fitness in adults aged 50+ years is strongly correlated with national economic indicators. In higher-income countries, not only is the prevalence of frailty lower, but frail people also live longer.