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Revisiting the hypothesis of syndromic frailty: a cross-sectional study of the structural validity of the frailty phenotype.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Fried's Phenotype Model of Frailty (PMF) postulates that frailty is a syndrome. Features of a syndrome are a heterogeneous population that can be split into at least two classes, those presenting and those not presenting the syndrome. Syndromes are characterized by a specific mixture of signs and symptoms which increase in prevalence, from less to more severe classes. So far, the null hypothesis of homogeneity - signs and symptoms of frailty cannot identify at least two classes - has been tested using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) on the five dichotomized components of PMF (unintentional weight loss, exhaustion, weakness, slowness, and low physical activity). The aim of this study is to investigate further the construct validity of frailty as a syndrome using the extension offered by Factor Mixture Models (FMM). METHODS:LCA on dichotomized scores and FMM on continuous scores were conducted to test homogeneity on the five PMF components in a sample of 1643 community-dwelling older adults living in Québec, Canada (FRéLE). RESULTS:With dichotomized LCA, three frailty classes were found: robust, prefrail and frail, and the hypothesis of homogeneity was rejected. However, in FMM, frailty was better represented as a continuous variable than as latent heterogeneous classes. Thus, the PMF measurement model of frailty did not meet the features of a syndrome in this study. CONCLUSION:Using the FRéLE cohort, the PMF measurement model validity is questioned. Valid measurement of a syndrome depends on an understanding of its etiological factors and pathophysiological processes, and on a modelling of how the measured components are linked to these processes. Without these features, assessing frailty in a clinical setting may not improve patient health. Research on frailty should address these issues before promoting its use in clinical settings.

SUBMITTER: Beland F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7590708 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Revisiting the hypothesis of syndromic frailty: a cross-sectional study of the structural validity of the frailty phenotype.

Béland François F Julien Dominic D Wolfson Christina C Bergman Howard H Gaudreau Pierrette P Galand Claude C Fletcher John J Zunzunegui Maria-Victoria MV Shatenstein Bryna B Kergoat Marie-Jeanne MJ Morais José A JA Fülöp Tamàs T

BMC geriatrics 20201027 1

<h4>Background</h4>Fried's Phenotype Model of Frailty (PMF) postulates that frailty is a syndrome. Features of a syndrome are a heterogeneous population that can be split into at least two classes, those presenting and those not presenting the syndrome. Syndromes are characterized by a specific mixture of signs and symptoms which increase in prevalence, from less to more severe classes. So far, the null hypothesis of homogeneity - signs and symptoms of frailty cannot identify at least two classe ...[more]

PMID: 33109091

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Project description:BACKGROUND:In the network approach to psychopathology, psychiatric disorders are considered networks of causally active symptoms (nodes), with node centrality hypothesized to reflect symptoms' causal influence within a network. Accordingly, centrality measures have been used in numerous network-based cross-sectional studies to identify specific treatment targets, based on the assumption that deactivating highly central nodes would proliferate to other nodes in the network, thereby collapsing the network structure and alleviating the overall psychopathology (i.e., the centrality hypothesis). METHODS:Here, we summarize three types of evidence pertaining to the centrality hypothesis in psychopathology. First, we discuss the validity of the theoretical assumptions underlying the centrality hypothesis in psychopathology. We then summarize the methodological aspects of extant studies using centrality measures as predictors of symptom change following treatment, while delineating their main findings and several of their limitations. Finally, using a specific dataset of 710 treatment-seeking patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an example, we empirically examine node centrality as a predictor of therapeutic change, replicating the approach taken by previous studies, while addressing some of their limitations. Specifically, we investigated whether three pre-treatment centrality indices (strength, predictability, and expected influence) were significantly correlated with the strength of the association between a symptom's change and the change in the severity of all other symptoms in the network from pre- to post-treatment (?node-?network association). Using similar analyses, we also examine the predictive validity of two simple non-causal node properties (mean symptom severity and infrequency of symptom endorsement). RESULTS:Of the three centrality measures, only expected influence successfully predicted how strongly changes in nodes/symptoms were associated with change in the remainder of the nodes/symptoms. Importantly, when excluding the amnesia node, a well-documented outlier in the phenomenology of PTSD, none of the tested centrality measures predicted symptom change. Conversely, both mean symptom severity and infrequency of symptom endorsement, two standard non-network-derived indices, were found to be more predictive than expected influence and remained significantly predictive also after excluding amnesia from the network analyses. CONCLUSIONS:The centrality hypothesis in its current form is ill-defined, showing no consistent supporting evidence in the context of cross-sectional, between-subject networks.

Dataset Information

Revisiting the hypothesis of syndromic frailty: a cross-sectional study of the structural validity of the frailty phenotype.

Publications

Revisiting the hypothesis of syndromic frailty: a cross-sectional study of the structural validity of the frailty phenotype.

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