As a medical resident 30 years ago, Ava Kaufman remembers
puzzling over some of the elderly patients who came to the
primary-care practice at George Washington University Hospital.
They weren't really ill, at least not with any identifiable
diseases. But they weren't well, either. They were thin and
weak. They had no energy. They tired easily. Their walking speed
was agonizingly slow. "We couldn't put our finger on a specific
diagnosis or problem,'' Kaufman says. "We didn't have a word for
it then.'' Today we do. It's called frailty. There have always
been frail people, but only in recent years has the term
"frailty" become a medical diagnosis, defined by specific
symptoms and increasingly focused on by those who deal with the
medical issues of the elderly. Clinicians now are looking at
ways to prevent or delay frailty, sometimes even reverse it.
"Frailty is not an age, it's a condition," says Kaufman, a
Bethesda, Md., internist and geriatrician. "We know it when we
see it, and it's always been with us." Whil