“Our findings support shared biological pathways underlying both heart failure and frailty, suggesting interventions to prevent or treat one outcome may help decrease the burden of the other,” said study leader Amil Shah, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Cardiology and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern.

As the world’s population ages, so do the prevalence and incidence of heart failure and frailty, disorders that tend to occur in the seventh decade of life and beyond. Heart failure is characterized by an inability of the heart to keep up with the body’s demands; symptoms of frailty are a general loss of physical function, with features often including unintentional weight loss, physical exhaustion, and low physical activity. Frailty occurs in up to half of people with heart failure, and the risk of heart failure increases in people with frailty.

Although inflammation has been implicated in both of these multisystem disorders, whether heart failure and frailty share molecular pathways has been unknown.

To answer this question, Dr. Shah and colleagues across the country used data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, an ongoing longitudinal study initiated in the late 1980s at sites in North Carolina, Mississippi, Minnesota, and Maryland. Originally meant to investigate factors that influence atherosclerosis risk in study participants over a series of visits, ARIC has expanded its scope over the past four decades, including an assessment of frailty at study visits five, six, and seven between 2011 and 2019.