Disablement Process in Mexican American Older Adults

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Frailty has been identified as a precursor of disability, institutionalization and mortality in older adults. Frailty has not been extensively studied in minority populations. We propose to examine frailty in a well- defined sample of Mexican American older adults. We will determine whether changes in strength, balance, walking speed, cognition, daily living skills and other components of frailty impact a person's ability to live independently in the community. The application requests five years of funding to extend and expand our current National Institute on Aging grant entitled "The Enabling-Disabling Process in Mexican American Older Adults." The Specific Aims for the proposed research are to: 1. Apply a standard definition of frailty in a well defined sample of Mexican American older adults, and 2. Examine the impact of frailty on disability, health related quality of life, institutionalization and mortality in Mexican American older adults cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Data will be collected from 1,000 Mexican American older adults. The participants are a sub-sample from the Hispanic Established Population Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly (EPESE). The study will be coordinated with data collected for the Hispanic EPESE. In-person interviews and performance-based assessments will be conducted two times over five years. Rater training and data collection protocols established in our current grant will be refined and used in the investigation. Frailty will be examined as a new component of the Enabling-Disabling Model using an operational definition developed by Fried and colleagues. Hierarchical linear modeling and statistical techniques designed to examine relationships among complex variables over time will be used to test hypotheses. The models will include demographic risk factors and standardized measures of strength and late life function that our current research has shown are related to disability, health related quality of life, and mortality. The findings will extend our understanding of how frailty impacts independence and quality of life in the rapidly expanding Mexican American older adult population.