Research Perspective Advance Articles
Analysis of the current state of frailty indexes and their implementation for aging intervention studies
- 1 Centre for Biological Engineering, School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK
- 2 Lifespan Research Institute, Mountain View, CA 94041, USA
Received: March 14, 2025 Accepted: August 13, 2025 Published: August 26, 2025
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206307How to Cite
Copyright: © 2025 Frost et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Animal lifespan studies are foundational to developing interventions against the biological aging process. In recent years, there has been rising interest in characterizing the effects of longevity therapeutics on health span. Frailty indexes, originally developed to assess clinical frailty in aging humans, have shown promise as measurements of biological age and have been adopted for use in rodent aging biology. This Perspective looks at the current state of rodent frailty indexes and how they are implemented. The differences in frailty parameters used to calculate these indexes have led to inconsistencies between studies defining frailty. In this Perspective, we have highlighted those differences and made recommendations for implementing protocols for frailty index measurement.