{"doi":"10.2147/cia.s249284","title":"&lt;p&gt;The Association of a Frailty Index and Incident Delirium in Older Hospitalized Patients: An Observational Cohort Study&lt;/p&gt;","abstract":"Introduction/Background: Frailty identifies patients that have vulnerability to stress. Acute illness and hospitalization are stressors that may result in delirium and further accelerate the negative consequences of frailty. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether frailty, identified at hospital admission and as measured by a frailty index, is associated with incident delirium. Methods: A retrospective, observational, cohort study was done at a Veterans hospital between January 2013 and March 2014. English-speaking patients over 55 years were eligible. Exclusion criteria included inability to complete baseline assessments due to pre-existing cognitive impairment, emergent surgery; and/or admission from a nursing home, pre-existing delirium, and those with psychiatric disease or substance use disorder. Main Outcomes and Measures: Frailty index (FI) variables included cognitive screening, physical function and comorbidities. The FI was calculated as a proportion of possible deficits (range 0 to 1; higher scores indicate increased frailty). Incident delirium was measured daily by an expert clinician interview. Results: A total of 247 patients were admitted and 218 met inclusion/exclusion criteria, with a mean age of 71.54 years (SD = 9.53 years) and were predominantly white (92.7%) and male (91.7%). Participants were grouped using FI ranges as non-frail (FI < 0.25, n=56 (26%)), pre-frail (FI =0.25– 0.35, n=86 (39%)), and frail (FI > 0.35, n=76 (35%)). Pre-frailty and frailty were associated with incident delirium (non-frail: 3.6% vs pre-frail: 20.9% vs frail: 29.3%, p =0.001) and total delirium days (mean day =non-frail 0.04 vs pre-frail 0.35 vs frail 0.57, p =0.003). After adjustment for sociodemographic factors, pre-frail (adjusted OR=5.64, 95% CI: 1.23, 25.99) and frail status (adjusted OR=6.80, 95% CI: 1.38, 33.45) were independently associated with delirium. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that a frailty index is independently associated with incident delirium and suggests that admission assessments for frailty may identify patients at high risk of developing delirium. Keywords: delirium, frailty, frailty index, Veterans, hospital","journal":"Clinical Interventions in Aging","year":2020,"id":76547,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":21,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9622,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":400824,"name":"Robert McConeghy","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":375098,"name":"Caroline Madrigal","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":399379,"name":"Deborah J. Culley","orcid":"0000-0002-1003-2407","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":399380,"name":"Rakesh C. Arora","orcid":"0000-0002-5799-3619","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":400825,"name":"James L. Rudolph","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":400823,"name":"Andrea Yevchak Sillner","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":35,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:48:27.511277Z","pmid":"33173286","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}