The association between apathy and frailty in older adults: a new investigation using data from the Mapt study

Introduction: Apathy is a behavioral syndrome that has been suggested to share similar neuro-physiological pathways with frailty. Objective: To investigate the cross-sectional association between apathy and frailty using original data from dementia-free, community-dwelling older adults Method: A cross-sectional analysis was performed to test the association between frailty (according to Fried’s frailty phenotype) and apathy (defined by three items from Geriatric Depression Scale) using data from MAPT, a 3-year, randomized, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial among community-dwelling, dementia-free participants (1.679 individuals with mean age of 75 years). Results: The ordinal logistic regression showed that apathetic individuals had a two-fold more probability to be rated as frail (OR 2.20, 95% CI 1.7–2.9), when adjusting for confounders. Apathetic individuals display a two-fold more likelihood to be rated as pre-frail (RRR 2.1; 95% CI 1.5–2.8) and a three-fold higher probability to be rated as frail (RRR 3.5, 95% CI 1.8–6.9) compared to robust participants. Conclusion: Although data on the associations between apathy and frailty are scarce, these conditions potentially shares physiological mechanisms and were found to be closely associated. Temporal association between frailty and apathy deserve to be further investigated.