View article

The purpose of this study was to examine factors associated with frailty in older cancer survivors.

This is a cross-sectional study using data from the National Social Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) Wave 2, and includes an in-home, nationally representative sample of community-dwelling adults ≥50 years and older from the United States. Frailty score was computed for each individual using a modified 4-point scale based on the phenotypic frailty. Ordinal logistic regression was used to characterize the association between health-related, sociodemographic factors and frailty.

Among the 3377 participants, 461 were cancer survivors (answered “yes” to “ever have cancer other than skin cancer”). A final sample of 394 cancer survivors were included: 59 participants (16.1%) were frail, 219 participants were pre-frail (59.8%), and 88 participants were non-frail (24.0%). The …