Intricate relationships between frailty and diabetes: where do we go from here?

Population ageing is a public health, societal, and economic problem around the world.2 Frailty, defined as a state of vulnerability of older adults that increases health risks, can be considered a proxy of accelerated ageing. The prevalence of frailty increases with age in all individuals, but at different rates3 and has previously been associated with diabetes in the older population.4 Due to the ageing population, frailty and diabetes are health outcomes that frequently co-occur and should therefore no longer be addressed independently. In The Lancet Healthy Longevity, Peter Hanlon and colleagues1 did a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies of frailty in people with diabetes, examining prevalence and associations with general and diabetes-specific outcomes, which provides a very comprehensive overview of this research area. To our knowledge, this is the first study to review the different dimensions of frailty in relation with general and diabetic outcomes.