Frailty rose faster in older women than men in Mexico
The adjusted gap between women’s and men’s frailty scores widened from 0.016 points at two years to 0.029 points at 17 years.
Limit: Frailty scores relied mainly on self-reported health
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
The observational cohort study included 12,440 adults aged 50–105 at enrollment in Mexico: 6,742 women and 5,698 men. Researchers analyzed five survey waves from 2001 to 2018. They measured frailty, an age-related state of vulnerability, using a score from 0 to 1 based on 31 health problems, mostly reported by participants. Higher scores meant greater frailty.
Frailty increased in both sexes, but women had higher scores and accumulated health problems faster. After accounting for social, behavioral and health differences, women’s average score was 0.014 higher than men’s at enrollment. Among the 4,533 participants who died, frailty accumulation accelerated in the years before death. Results suggested that women reached death with higher frailty than men.
Why it matters
Frailty is associated with disability and death. The authors said healthy-aging strategies should consider vulnerabilities across life that disproportionately contribute to women’s frailty in low- and middle-income countries.
Caveats
This observational study cannot establish why frailty differed by sex, and its scores relied mainly on self-reported health. The findings concern adults aged 50 and older in Mexico; the preprint has not been peer-reviewed.
The paper
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
medRxiv, Jul 6, 2026, Open access, CC BY, Preprint, not peer-reviewed
