Research on Frailty: Where We Stand and Where We Need to Go

More than a century ago, Elie Metchnikoff, winner of the Nobel Prize of Physiology and Medicine in 1908, proposed the term gerontology to define the “scientific study of old age.”1 Six years later, Ignatz Leo Nascher coined the term geriatrics to define the branch of medicine devoted to the prevention and care of diseases in older people in a book and presentation to the NewYork Academy of Sciences.2 Two decades later, in the 1930s, Marjorie Warren showed that “chronic sick, unclassified and ill-assorted” disabled older patients, long admitted to a London Hospital, when appropriately treated were able to recover functionally and be discharged to their homes.