The biological, social and behavioral factors (captured by gender) may contribute to women's greater longevity. In particular, a combination of sex- and gender-sensitive factors might result in a greater frailty burden in women.
This study will be planned with the following aims:
1. Creation of a frailty index (FI) score for medical patients admitted in internal medicine wards to estimate the prevalence of vulnerability considering sex and gender-sensitive variables;
2. To analyze the prognostic impact of FI score on short-term and long-term clinical outcomes.
Study Design: Observational prospective, multicenter.
Subjects: All consecutive patients with a medical condition requiring the hospital admission in an internal medicine ward will be proposed to enter in the study.
An FI can be computed from variables routinely collected in the daily clinical practice and/or available databases.
All the patients will be recruited in the Internal Medicine Units involved. The first week of every month will be the index week for the enrollment.
We plan to include in the study n =10 patients every first week of the month (at least 120 patients per center) for 1-year enrolling period.
Outcome measures: i) In-hospital stay, ii) In-hospital mortality, iii) Readmissions or deaths within 30 days, iv) Re-admissions or deaths after 12 months.
