Prevalence and factors associated with the frailty in elderly patients attended to an outpatient care specialty clinics

Abstract

Cross-sectional study developed with 374 elderly patients of a teaching hospital of the region of Campos Gerais that aimed to identify the prevalence of factors associated with the frailty in elderly people of an outpatient care specialty clinics. The data collect consisted of interview, Mini-Mental State Examination and Edmonton Frail Scale. A bivariate and multiple analysis was performed by means of Poisson regression with their respective 95% confidence intervals. The prevalence of frailty was 40.1%, with significant association to the variables feminine gender (p=0.002), low schooling (p=0.020), presence of self-reported disease (s) (p=0.006), medications (p=0.001), loss of urine (p=0.001), falls (p=0.001) and to the hospitalization (p=0.001). The prevalence of frailty identified was discretely less than the one found in study of a reference center and higher than the one of elderly persons of the community, with associated socio-demographic and clinical factors. Which requires an attentive look of the health professionals about this profile.