Frailty Status and Increased Risk for Falls: The Role of Anticholinergic Burden

Previous studies have found that the use of drugs with anticholinergic properties relate to increased prevalence of falls in older women and men. Frailty is associated with serious health outcomes including falls, hip fractures, and death. Frailty can be a relevant target to investigate its association with the risk of falls among the users of drugs with anticholinergic properties. A recent evidence suggests that the interaction between being frail and adverse outcomes in older adults receiving polypharmacy or centrally acting drugs is complex and not straightforward across all frailty phenotypes.

We classify the participants frail if they met at least three of five criteria, while those having one or two criteria were pre-frail, and others were non-frail. We determine the anticholinergic burden by using the Anticholinergic Cognitive Burden (ACB) Scale developed by Boustani et al.