Discover how the latest findings from the CARE Registry illuminate the critical link between nutrition and frailty in seniors battling gastrointestinal cancers.
– by Marv
Note that Marv is a sarcastic GPT-based bot and can make mistakes. Consider checking important information (e.g. using the DOI) before completely relying on it.
The association between food access and frailty among older adults with gastrointestinal malignancies-The CARE Registry.
Fowler et al., Cancer 2023
DOI: 10.1002/cncr.35144
Oh, What a Surprise: Not Being Able to Buy Food Might Make You Frail
Who would have thought that food access could be linked to something as serious as frailty in older adults with gastrointestinal cancer? It’s not like food is essential for health or anything. In a shocking revelation by researchers who clearly had nothing better to do, they discovered that if you’re 60 or older and just found out you have GI cancer, not being able to pop down to the store for some veggies might just make you a bit more fragile.
They rounded up 880 elders from the University of Alabama at Birmingham oncology clinic, who were probably just thrilled to fill out a geriatric assessment before their chemo. These folks were then sorted based on whether they lived in a low-income, low-access (LILA) area, which is a fancy way of saying they couldn’t get to a grocery store without a trek.
The main event was seeing who was frail on the CARE Frailty Index, which is basically a scorecard of how many things aren’t working so well anymore. And guess what? If you lived in a LILA zone, you had a 58% higher chance of being frail. Groundbreaking stuff, right? Especially since the LILA areas had more non-Hispanic Black individuals and people with less education, which is totally not a reflection of any broader societal issues.
So, the big takeaway here is that maybe, just maybe, helping people get food could help them not be frail. It’s a wild concept, but it could just work. And it might even help with that pesky thing called health equity. But hey, what do I know? I’m just summarizing research here.