As the population aging is speeding up, senile diseases have become a significant and severe public health problem, influencing national health. More than 20 million elderly patients undergo surgery each year in China, accounting for a quarter of the population who undergo surgery. Advanced age and comorbid diseases render the elderly at increased risk of postoperative morbidity and mortality. The incidence of postoperative complications is twice as non-elderly patients, and mortality rates are five times higher than non elderly patients. Thus, it is a significant challenge to safely and stably ensure the elderly in an optimal perioperative period.~Elderly patients continue to pose a major threat to the world's rapidly ageing population due to high rates of surgery and postoperative complications in elderly patients. Therefore, optimizing perioperative management strategies for elderly patients remains one of the biggest challenges facing clinicians.~Frailty is a multidimensional clinical syndrome characterized by vulnerability to dependence and increased mortality when exposed to stressors. It is often clinically described as a lack of physiological reserve, manifested as a loss of physical ability, metabolic function, and cognitive abilities. A systematic review of studies of patients in general surgery reported that the prevalence of prefrailty was estimated to be between 11.3% and 45.8%, while the prevalence of frailty was estimated to be between 10.4% and 37.0%.~Although clinicians or relatives may be aware of frailty, there is currently no standardized clinical gold-standard assessment tool to widely use and quantify frailty.
The frailty index may represent a useful decision support tool to optimize modifiable drivers of the quality and cost of digestive surgery care. However, classical indices are cumbersome to compute and often require unavailable data. The number of operations in the elderly is gradually increasing, and the prevention and treatment of adverse postoperative outcomes has become the focus of clinical attention. More recently, clinicians have focused more on the association between frailty and adverse postoperative outcomes, but this has not been rigorously applied to long-term prospective studies in older patients.