Dissecting the Racial/Ethnic Disparity in Frailty in a Nationally Representative Cohort Study with Respect to Health, Income, and Measurement

BACKGROUND

Racial/ethnic frailty prevalence disparities have been documented. Better elucidating how these operate may inform interventions to eliminate them. We aimed to determine whether physical frailty phenotype (PFP) prevalence disparities (i) are explained by health aspects, (ii) vary by income, or (iii) differ in degree across individual PFP criteria.

METHODS

Data came from the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study baseline evaluation. The study sample (n = 7,439) included persons in all residential settings except nursing homes. Logistic regression was used to achieve aims (i)-(iii) listed above. In (i), health aspects considered were body mass index (BMI) status and number of chronic diseases. Analyses incorporated sampling weights and adjusted for sociodemographic factors.

RESULTS

Comparisons are versus non-Hispanic whites: Non-Hispanic blacks (odds ratio [OR] = 1.46, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.21-1.76) and Hispanics (1.56, 1.20-2.03) continued to have higher odds of frailty after accounting for BMI status and number of chronic diseases. Non-Hispanic blacks had elevated odds of frailty in all income quartiles, including the highest (OR = 2.19, 1.24-3.397). Racial/ethnic disparities differed considerably across frailty criteria, ranging from a twofold increase in odds of slowness to a 25%-30% decrease in odds of self-reported exhaustion.

CONCLUSIONS

BMI and disease burden do not explain racial/ethnic frailty disparities. Black-white disparities are not restricted to low-income groups. Racial/ethnic differences vary considerably by NHATS PFP criteria. Our findings support the need to better understand mechanisms underlying elevated frailty burden in older non-Hispanic black and Hispanic Americans, how phenotypic measures capture frailty in racial/ethnic subgroups and, potentially, how to create assessments more comparable by race/ethnicity.

Quantitative differential monitoring of the metabolic activity of Corynebacterium glutamicum cultures utilizing a light-addressable potentiometric sensor system

Applying biosensors for evaluation of the extracellular acidification of microorganisms in various biotechnological fermentation processes is on demand. An early stage detection of disturbances in the production line would avoid costly interventions related to metabolically inactive microorganisms. Furthermore, the determination of the number of living cells through cell plating procedure after cultivations is known as time- and material-consuming. In this work, a differential light-addressable potentiometric sensor (LAPS) system was developed to monitor the metabolic activity of Corynebacterium glutamicum (C. glutamicum ATCC13032) as typical microorganism in fermentation processes. In this context, the number of living cells in suspensions was directly determined utilizing the read-out principle of the LAPS system. The planar sensor surface of the LAPS design allows to fixate 3D-printed multi-chamber structures, which enables differential measurements. In this way, undesirable external influences such as pH variations of the medium and sensor signal drift can be compensated.

Microtesla NMR J-coupling spectroscopy with an unshielded atomic magnetometer

We present experimental data and theoretical interpretation of NMR spectra of remotely magnetized samples, detected in an unshielded environment by means of a differential atomic magnetometer. The measurements are performed in an ultra-low-field at an intermediate regime, where the J-coupling and the Zeeman energies have comparable values and produce rather complex line sets, which are satisfactorily interpreted.