After decades of research, frailty is much more than just a physical construct. It’s a clinical syndrome that can affect different areas of health and care. But is frailty an inevitable part of aging? Or can we prevent or delay it?
On this episode of Aging Forward, we talk with geriatrician Dr. Brandon Verdoorn about the importance of understanding and recognizing frailty as a geriatric syndrome — and life hacks for dealing with frailty.
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Dr. Christina Chen: Welcome to “Aging Forward,” a podcast of thoughtful conversations on topics related to geriatric medicine and healthy aging from experts in the fields of internal medicine, geriatrics and palliative care. Whether you are in the medical training field, practicing in the healthcare field, a caregiver, or perhaps someone who is simply interested in learning more about the science of aging and how to improve your health span, this podcast is for you.
I’m your host, Christina Chen, and today we welcome our first guest, Dr. Brandon Verdoorn to kick off our series here on the topic of frailty. Why is everyone talking about it and what can we do about it? Welcome Dr. Verdoorn.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Thank you so much. Thrilled to be here.
Dr. Christina Chen: You know, we’ve been talking about this podcast for a while and it’s just really exciting to see it come to life and have you be part of our origins of success. Again, happy to have you here.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Thank you. Honored to be your first guest, Christy.
Dr. Christina Chen: I’m just going to embarrass you a little bit here, Brandon, but Dr. Verdoorn is a geriatrician in the department of community medicine, geriatrics and palliative care. He is not only a talented clinical educator, but also a medical director of two nursing homes in town here. He is also the course director of two medical conferences. Dr. Verdoorn is going to be the new program director for our Mayo Clinic Geriatrics Fellowship Program. Congratulations
Why is Frailty a Significant Topic in Geriatrics?
We’re very excited and happy for that transition and it’s going to be great. Out of all the things to talk about as our first episode, why frailty? Why is it such a big deal? It is a big deal. And it’s something that we live and breathe every day because we’re immersed in this, right? We’re in this every day. We teach this to our fellows and our residents, our medical students, but for the general public, it’s still seen as sort of an adjective to describe someone.
It’s seen as a physical construct. And I encourage our listeners to sort of think about when you hear the word frailty, what it means to you. What do you envision? Is it someone who seems more vulnerable or more fragile? What does it look like to you? Over the past couple of decades, That concept has sort of changed literature and research has shown that it’s more than just that. There’s more implications. And so, Dr. Verdoorn, our first question for you today is how has this understanding changed over the years?
How Has Our Understanding of Frailty Evolved Over Time?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: That’s a great question. And you hit it that the word frailty has been around for a long time and, like you said, most people have a picture in their head when they say the word frailty of what that looks like. My picture might be a little different than your picture, but I think what’s really happened over the past 20 years or so, really since around the turn of the millennium, is that in medicine there’s been an attempt to better define what this term means, not just sort of as a lay term that we can all use loosely and a little bit differently, but as a medical syndrome, and I think it still exists as a word for lay people as well.
In that context it is used in a lot of different ways, but in medicine we’ve started to hone in on sort of what do we mean when we say frailty and this initially grew out of some research at Johns Hopkins back in 2001 where they basically looked at a big group of several thousand older adults living in the community and just kind of followed them for several years to kind of see how they did, who got sick, who died, who remained functional and lived a pretty healthy life. Then they attempted to sort of define this syndrome of frailty. I’m certainly happy to go into more detail about what that definition looks like if you’d like.
Is Frailty an Inevitable Part of Aging?
Dr. Christina Chen: I think about an example like my grandmother. My grandmother was the epitome of health. She passed away at 99 years old, two months shy of her 100th birthday, but she was so healthy up until that point. She was very active and functional in her 90s and was still shoveling snow and raking leaves and we’re like, no, grandma, stop it! Get back in here! But she just loved it. She just loved staying active. And it wasn’t until the last six months where she really started to slow down. I remember thinking, wow, she’s looking really, really frail. A common question that I often get is, doesn’t this just happen to all of us? Isn’t this just a part of natural aging? Isn’t this inevitable as we grow old?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: That’s a great question. And before addressing that, I’ll just say, your grandmother sounds incredibly impressive. I can’t even shovel snow without getting several aches and pains in the winter. I hope to be anywhere near 99 and still working out in my yard. That’s pretty cool. This question, isn’t frailty just sort of happens when you get old, I think is a great question.
Before I address that specifically, I think maybe I’ll just step back and comment that as we think about if we sort of had to give a medical definition for this term, frailty, in a couple sentences, just to kind of give our listeners a sense of what we’re talking about here, frailty is this idea that there is decline or troubles in multiple systems in your body, and that decline in multiple systems makes you vulnerable to bad things happening to you from a health perspective and particularly you’re vulnerable to bad things happening to you with fairly minor stressors.
If you or I for instance got what we call community acquired pneumonia, a lung infection that you got while you’re out living your life in the community, you know we’d take our antibiotic pill for a few days and we’d feel sick and we’d stay home and lay on the couch, but we get better, and in a couple of weeks, we’d be back at work and we’d be feeling back to normal.
For somebody that is frail, when something like that happens, their chances of getting so sick that they have to go to the hospital, having to have oxygen or other means to support their breathing, going to the intensive care unit, even dying, or if they recover from that infection, never really fully getting back to their prior quality of life and functional state, is very, very high.
That’s kind of what frailty is in a nutshell. And this question of does that happen to all of us as we age is a great question. And really, it’s more complicated than that. If you just think about a hypothetical situation of comparison, two people that are acquainted, and are about the same age, one who’s 90 can look vastly different from another person who’s 90 in terms of how well they’re able to function and how fast can they walk and how many of their day-to-day activities can they do on their own and how do they navigate the community? And if it were just age that led to these changes in the body and this vulnerability, every 90-year-old would look the same.
We’d all be able to walk the same speed and do the same things and we’d all feel the same, but clearly there’s more at play than that. I think about this concept of frailty and what contributes to it. Age is a piece of it. You’re more likely to be frail. When you’re older, for sure, but lifestyle plays a huge role.
What were your exercise habits? What sort of environment did you live in? Did you use substances? What are your genetics? What was your diet like? How many chronic diseases do you have and how severe are those? All of those things are important inputs to this idea of frailty.
What Are the Health Risks Associated with Frailty?
Dr. Christina Chen: You mentioned earlier some of the consequences are perhaps not being able to recover from illnesses as quickly. What are some other negative consequences of developing early frailty or having that predisposition for frailty?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: There are a lot of potential consequences, and really, in medicine, we can look at just about any situation we can dream up from the perspective of somebody’s health. We can look at just older adults who are living in the community going about their lives, and we know that those who are frail, Are going to, on average, not live as long on average. They are more likely to move into a nursing home on average, be more likely to develop troubles doing their basic day-to-day activities.
Things like bathing and walking around their house and making meals and getting in and out of the chair and that sort of thing, we know that for folks. Contemplating going through a surgical procedure is that if you’re frail, you’re much less likely for that to go well, and you’re more likely to have complications and even die in the weeks or months following your surgery.
Basically, if you can dream up a situation frailty is a predictor of higher risk for things not going well in that situation.
Why Should Medical Trainees in All Specialties Understand Frailty?
Dr. Christina Chen: I’m glad you mentioned some of those scenarios because a lot of our listeners are medical trainees, medical students, residents who are going into different fields, not just geriatrics or internal medicine, but aspiring cardiologists and oncologists, surgeons, anesthesiologist. I mean this is relevant to them too. What can we speak to folks who are going through this training to know how frailty is pertinent to their specific area of specialty training that they’re planning on going into?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: That’s a great question. Frailty is not just for geriatricians. It’s this terminology that we should all become familiar with and in terms we should all be thinking about. This question of why should I care if I’m in medical specialty X or Y or Z, I think before we answer that, maybe it’s worth thinking a little bit about if I’m a cardiologist sitting in my clinic or I’m an anesthesiologist evaluating somebody prior to surgery, how do we actually quickly detect who is frail and who’s not right.
We talked earlier about this idea that we probably all have a picture in our head of what someone who’s frail looks like, but we have to be able to go beyond that. And there’s actually been a lot of work over the past couple decades by various groups to sort of nail down kind of how we objectively define this syndrome.
One way to think about it, and maybe the most widely talked about and accepted way to think about it is what we call a phenotype. That basically means sort of a set of characteristics that can be seen, heard and measured. There are five things that we can think about that define who’s frail.
I’ll use layman’s terms to describe these. Being slow, not being able to walk very fast, being tired, having low energy or fatigue, being sedentary. So not moving around much, you know, somebody who spends a lot of their time in bed or a chair. So, uh, yeah. Being weak, so low muscle strength and then shrinking, so losing weight.
Those five things are what have been described as the frailty phenotype, or you can think of those as the common characteristics that we often see in someone who’s frail. You don’t need to have all five of those things to be frail, but a fairly common definition is that you have, if you have at least three of those, you’re frail. That’s all well and good, but when they initially defined this set of characteristics, they had a bunch of special tools to measure these. You had to use a special tool to measure how hard you could grip. And that was how they defined muscle strength, for instance.
Those are not practical things for a healthcare provider to use in the office when they want to figure out in 30 seconds who’s frail. There’s been a lot of subsequent effort to figure out how we take that set of five characteristics and how do we simplify it even further? There are several ways to do that. And one of those is simply what we call gate speed. Measuring how fast someone can walk. That seems to have a secret sauce to kind of get at this idea of who’s vulnerable to bad stuff happening. That’s one way to measure it. There are a couple of other ways that are easy to do in the office, too.
If I were any healthcare provider in medicine and I wanted to kind of integrate this concept of frailty into my care, the first thing I would be doing is thinking about how I actually decide when I have a patient sitting in front of me who’s frail. And I think this is also relevant to the general public. If I’m a caregiver for an aging parent or I’m an older adult and I’m thinking about this concept of frailty and I wonder how I find out if I’m frail, these are things I can think about, or I can ask my healthcare provider about.
How Can We Quickly Identify Frailty in a Clinical Setting?
Dr. Christina Chen: I feel like I’m frail just by listening to this.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: There are particular cutoffs for these things. I suspect, Dr. Chen, even though you think you’re frail. But I think, going back to your original question, why does this matter to people and other specialties? Like I said earlier this impacts how our patients are going to do regardless of a situation. If I’m an anesthesiologist evaluating somebody before a major surgery, I better know whether or not they’re frail because if they’re frail, I need to counsel them differently about what their risks are of this procedure and what the potential benefits of this procedure are and what the chances are that recover after this procedure.
If I’m a cardiologist taking care of somebody with heart failure and I’m trying to give them as much accurate information as I can about what their future might look like, I better know if they’re frail because that answer is going to be much, much different if they are versus if they’re not.
Dr. Christina Chen: How much it adds to mortality risk.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Absolutely.
Dr. Christina Chen: Like you mentioned, there’s so many negative potential consequences, not just with infections and nursing home placement, but this can potentially lead to an early cause of death.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: That’s a very interesting question because I, when we look at the headline mortality statistics in the United States or, read in the media about common causes of death, we hear a lot about heart disease. We hear a lot about cancer. We hear a lot about dementia. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of any of those things. They are huge issues and they need to be focused on public health efforts. And certainly we hear about them for a reason, but I think this concept of frailty has been overlooked as a cause of death.
I think back to when I was a kid and somebody that was acquainted with my family would pass away and Verdorn would run around saying, mommy, why did that person pass away and they’d say, “Oh, well, Brandon, they died of old age.” And I think this concept that we have died of old age doesn’t really make sense. It goes back to that thing we were saying later or earlier about if we’re really dying of old age, we’d all sort of have the same clock and it would expire at 90 years and 361 days. Two hours, right? But then it doesn’t work like that. I think this idea we’ve had over time of people dying of old age is probably really dying of frailty.
We say that when people die and we don’t have an obvious either chronic disease or acute event, infection or injury or trauma to attach it to like, “Oh, we don’t really. Nothing was really obvious. We’ll call it old age,” but really, that’s probably frailty. And there’s actually been literature looking at this and improving this concept that in some studies up to a quarter or so of older adults that pass away. If you just follow a big group of older adults in the community and you don’t do anything, you just watch and you see when they die and what they do. It looks like frailty. It’s kind of the only identifiable thing.
Dr. Christina Chen: It’s really interesting that it’s the cause of death. It’s up there with other common causes of death, like cancer, heart disease and diabetes. I mean, we’re screening for those routinely for our older adult population and general adult population. How come we’re not screening more for frailty? I mean, it sounds fairly simple to do. There aren’t any specific blood tests per se, but how come we don’t do this more routinely if this is such a big problem?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: It’s a great question. And I hope when we’re in the latter stages of our careers, that there’s a wider understanding and a different sort of approach to this issue. I think some of it’s just because, not as a word, but as a well-defined syndrome in medicine, this is still pretty new. It’s really been over the past couple of decades. And for whatever reason, I think during a lot of that time, it was kind of known in the geriatric world.
If I’m a geriatrician or somebody who does research on aging. I probably know what this concept of frailty means, but if I’m somebody who’s in another medical specialty or out in the community, it hasn’t really entered my vocabulary yet or I don’t hear much about it. I’m not sure I know exactly why that is, but part of our job as geriatricians and as folks interested in healthy aging is to help publicize this concept and its importance.
What Can Caregivers Look for to Identify Frailty in Loved Ones?
Dr. Christina Chen: Are there things that caregivers can be on the lookout for their loved ones who may be falling into that category of frailty or pre-frailty?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: If I were a caregiver, what would I look for? I think it goes back to those five layman’s terms that I mentioned earlier. If I’m noticing, ”Gosh, mom used to be able to move around pretty quickly, but she’s really slowed down and is really walking slowly over recent months,” or if I notice, “Gosh, dad used to be up and on his feet for a big part of the day. And, over the last few months he just mostly sits in the chair and either is too weak or doesn’t have the energy to get up and do much.” Certainly weight loss, and sometimes that’s measured weight loss for folks that are weighing themselves regularly, but it may also just be saying, “Gosh, she looks a lot skinnier,” or “his clothes are fitting differently?” or ”that sort of.”
All of those layman’s terms: being slow, weak, tired, sedentary, shrinking, are things to look for. I think other risk factors, if you’re a caregiver taking care of somebody who has a lot of chronic medical conditions, this is not an inclusive list, but we think about things like heart disease, lung disease, emphysema, COPD, chronic kidney disease, any liver problems, dementia—those sorts of things.
The more of those things you have, the more likely you are, the higher risk you are for developing frailty. Those are some of the things that I would keep my eye out for if I were a caregiver, either to tell me who might be at risk or who could even be starting to develop frailty. And if I had any questions about those things, I would go to my caregiver’s healthcare provider and ask them those things at the next appointment.
Does Hospitalization Increase the Risk of Frailty in Older Adults?
Dr. Christina Chen: Something that I’ve observed as well is when patients are repeatedly hospitalized for whatever health exacerbation, every time they go to the hospital, they get a little bit more debilitated. They then come back and may have improved a little bit, but that repeated hit can really affect them negatively and contribute to this whole, whole process of decline.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: That’s a great point. We know what we call the trajectory. If we think about how this syndrome of frailty progresses over years, we know that over long periods of time people tend to be progressively slower, more weak, more tired and have declining health. Many times, as you pointed out, that’s not a perfectly smooth transcribed linear sort of process. It can be punctuated by these health events. Many times that’s maybe someone getting an infection or maybe falling and breaking a hip or has something else happened to them that lands them in the hospital.
We see when that happens, an accelerated decline. Somebody might, in the course of a few days, go from being able to walk on their own to not being able to walk, for instance, and many times after that there’s a period of recovery. And certainly as a health care community, we do the very best we can to try to aid people in gaining strength back and gaining function back after those episodes. But people don’t always fully gain that back. Sometimes that becomes sort of a downward step and that long-term decline that we see with frailty.
What Can Be Done to Prevent Frailty?
Dr. Christina Chen: We’ve talked a lot about frailty and sort of its scarier aspects of progression, but all hope is not lost. I think there’s still a lot we can do to catch it early and prevention is key, right? An ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. What can we be doing perhaps as early as possible, especially if we’re prone to developing this. What can we be doing now to prevent frailty? Should I learn to walk faster and not be so lazy? Is this something that’s pertinent to me in my 40s?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: It’s a great question and I was hoping we’d pivot to a kind of “what can we do” and a hopeful piece of this because it sounds frailty and sounds dire based on the last couple minutes of conversation. But like many things in healthcare, there are things that we can do. Maybe I’ll start with folks who are already frail, or maybe have one or two of those five big characteristics that I talked about earlier, getting close to a threshold where they’d be considered frail because there’s actually been some study about what are the things we can do to kind of help that.
This is not going to be a big shock to any of our listeners likely, but the thing that’s the most powerful in that situation is exercise. There’s actually very good evidence that exercise can’t cure frailty, and over very long periods of time, over many, many years, even if you exercise, you’re probably slowly going to get more frail, but you can slow that process down a lot—even probably in the short or medium term can improve. People who are, for instance, considered frail by those I mentioned earlier, you need three of those five big characteristics with a good exercise program. You might start with three and you might for a while only have one or two or none.
It is to an extent modifiable for a while. Exercise is very powerful. We don’t understand with a whole lot of nuance, kind of what exactly is the perfect secret sauce exercise wise. Like people might ask him, is it better for me to swim or ride a bike or walk? And I think many of those details remain to be elucidated, but one comment I would make is that probably just walking, and I’m again not saying here that walking isn’t a good thing, walking is good for your health for lots of reasons, but probably just walking is less powerful than forms of exercise that includes some strength training.
Trying to increase muscle strength is important. There are a lot of ways to achieve that, of course. Some people have access to a gym. Some people might live at a complex or a facility where there are group exercise classes. Some folks might be able to be referred to a physical therapist by their healthcare provider. There’s all sorts of ways to achieve that. But probably something that includes some muscle strengthening is important. Weight training. And then I think as we think sort of earlier in life, for those of us in our forties or our fifties or our sixties who aren’t yet frail, this isn’t necessarily on our present day radar, but are just thinking about how do we try to reduce our chances or delay this happening when we get older.
There’s not actually a lot of study on this that I’m aware of, but I think it goes back to a lot of the things that we typically hear. Exercise is still going to be very powerful. Many chronic diseases that we’ve talked about that contribute to frailty are strongly contributed to by lifestyle, right? Our dietary choices and other habits. All of those things. And I know people probably feel like they get beat over the head with this advice, but it’s for a reason. It’s because these things are incredibly powerful in terms of how they impact our health. And that’s no exception with frailty.
Are There Any Medications or Supplements to Help Combat Frailty?
Dr. Christina Chen: Fantastic. Do you know if there are any pharmaceutical options on the horizon that there’s medicine for? This is such a big health issue. Are there pharmaceutical options that can help combat this or perhaps supplements on the market that people may not be aware of?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Great question. And the answer is there’s a lot of people who have been working on this idea for the past couple of decades. How do we take this idea of frailty as sort of a set of characteristics that we can see and measure, that puts people at higher risk for bad things happening to them? Can we figure out what’s actually going on in the body at a cellular level that causes this? We’re not going to delve into all of that in this venue, but I’ll say that there’s increasing understanding of what those things are. And people are developing drugs to try to target some of those things.
There are actually various drugs that are in clinical trials in humans. Looking at these questions, and typically it’s a multi-year process for medicines to get there. They have to be studied exhaustively in the lab, and then they have to be studied in animals to make sure that they look safe and that they look like they might actually help with something like frailty, and then they can go to be studied in humans.
That kind of many year process has gotten to the point where we’re testing things in human beings to see if they work, and exactly which medicines will work at what dose, at what frequency, when in life should they be taken? I mean, all of those details remain to be hammered out. This is going to unfold across the course of our careers, and I think there’s a lot of hope in the aging research community that we will be able to identify things that, along with exercise and good lifestyle choices, will help this issue. But it’s not ready for prime time.
Dr. Christina Chen: Yeah, hopefully within our generation.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Hopefully so. We’ll get somewhere. I know there’s a lot of optimism. No, I don’t have my crystal ball. It is cloudy today, but it’s an exciting time. I think, and I’m not a researcher, I’m a clinician, but it’s an exciting time in aging research. And I think there’s a potential for a lot of things to change across the course of the next handful of decades.
How Can Older Adults Live Positively with Frailty?
Dr. Christina Chen: This is an “Aging Forward” podcast theme and we always want to help encourage our listeners, our patients and caregivers and loved ones and ultimately ourselves. How do we age forward positively despite the limitations that we may face. On this topic of frailty, living with frailty, how do we still help people live well? How do we help them set goals, even though things will obviously change with time, but what are some thoughts or advice that you could give our general audience members on that theme?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: There’s a lot of layers to this and a lot of things we could say, but maybe that’s the thing that sticks out the most to me is if you go to the doctor and we get a printout at the end of our visit and it says, here’s the things you were seen today for and it has a list of all the things you have wrong with you basically. We like to label things in medicine and give names to different conditions that folks have, and frailty is one of those things, but the things on that sheet don’t define you.
We talked about, even for somebody who’s already frail, there’s things that you can do to get stronger, to get more energy, to feel better. Even if it’s not a cure you can change your life even when you have serious medical conditions, including frailty. It’s tempting to sort of think of the diseases we have as our destiny, but they don’t define us.We can all do things, even when our health has declined to change our life and to improve our quality of life. Just hold on to that idea.
What Are the Key Takeaways on Frailty for Caregivers and Older Adults?
Dr. Christina Chen: I love that. And there’s always something to look forward to. And despite our health conditions, that doesn’t define who you are and what your goals are near or far. That’s great. And I always love to close off our discussion with two takeaway points, just like any lecture, what can we walk away from this conversation and hold on to? And usually I stick with two or three just so it’s not too overwhelming. But what are two takeaways that you would share with our listeners today from this discussion?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: I usually only remember one thing after the lecture, but we’ll do two today because probably our listeners have a better memory than I do. I think one of them is just awareness. And think of this term frailty and remember kind of in basic terms what it means. It’s lots of things in your body not working right. That makes you vulnerable to bad things happening to you from a health perspective. And remember those five characteristics that I mentioned. Those are things that you can look for in yourself or in your loved ones. Being slow, being tired, being weak, being sedentary. And shrinking or losing weight. That would be number one.
Then I think number two, and again, people are going to say, ”Oh my gosh, I listened to this whole 30 minute podcast. And at the end, the punchline was, he just told me to exercise.” Like I’ve never heard that before, but it’s exercise, right? I mean, exercise is incredibly powerful, certainly as something that can delay frailty and modify it to an extent after.
It probably has a big role in prevention as well. Find ways that work for you in your life to incorporate exercise, that doesn’t need to mean that you go to the gym and you get on the bench press and start lifting weights. It can start very simple if you get up and walk for five minutes a day. And you can grow from there, but find a way as much as you can to incorporate exercise into your life.
Dr. Christina Chen: I love that. I think sometimes when people hear exercise, we think of, I have to go to the gym five days a week and do weightlifting for an hour. And it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s incorporated into your lifestyle. And so for me, I don’t have time to go to the gym every day, but before going up the stairs of my house, for example, I force myself to do five pushups and that’s something I just have to do. And it’s become part of my routine. [00:31:06]
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Right. It makes it into a habit. I think a lot of times it’s establishing that habit. That’s hard. Right. It feels it’s not natural. We have to think about it. We don’t remember it. It seems like it’s an imposition on our busy days. But once you do it without thinking it just becomes a part of the fabric of your day. You can you get over that initial hump?
Dr. Christina Chen: I heard somewhere that just aim for one goal percent better per day. And that adds up to an exponentially improved lifestyle later on. Our last portion here today is just a few rapid fire questions for you.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Okay. I’m ready.
Dr. Christina Chen: Okay. Something an older adult patient taught you that really stood out? All
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Right. I was thinking about this beforehand. There are so many that it’s hard to choose. I’m going to go with one that I actually heard from somebody that I visited yesterday who was feeling a little bit down and we were talking about this. She told me something that her father used to tell her when she was little. When you feel sad, just smile instead. All right. I think that idea of taking control of our attitude and how we feel is just a really poignant, powerful message.
Dr. Christina Chen: I love that. That’s sweet. Think about yourself at 75 years old. What would you like to be doing?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Traveling the world.
Dr. Christina Chen: Nice.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Anything walking fast.
Dr. Christina Chen: Traveling the world and walking fast and being safe.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Indeed.
Dr. Christina Chen: How about some life lessons or hacks learned as a geriatrician since your career?
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: This is really interesting because I think we’ve talked about frailty in a lot of our discussions revolving around lifestyle contributors and what we can do with our lifestyle. I think when you see diseases like this and you counsel people on these topics every day, you can’t help but have an impact in your own life. For instance, I found you during the early part of the pandemic and as many people probably know, a lot of healthcare systems did a lot of virtual care for a while. I was sitting at home, on my butt, in my office, not moving around much.
I had this epiphany of, “Oh my gosh, if I don’t change what I’m doing in my day-to-day, I’m going to get all these diseases that I see people for every day.” I think seeing those things every day has helped me to make better decisions with my own physical activity, my own diet, my own sleep that maybe I wouldn’t have been quite as equipped to make if I didn’t think about these things at work all day.
Dr. Christina Chen: Well, there you have it. Dr. Verdorn’s advice on healthy aging, exercise and smile when you are sad.
Dr. Brandon Verdoorn: Good words to end on.
Dr. Christina Chen: Great. Thank you so much for listening today. If you found this podcast to be helpful and interesting, please share and follow me on Instagram @mayocliniccommunitymed, at my personal account, @grey.edelweiss, and our Twitter account @mayoclinicCIMGP. We will see you at the next episode of “Aging Forward,” helping you, your patients, and loved ones live well.
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Foreword by Tia Newcomer, CEO of CaringBridge When Cris Ross and Ed Marx were diagnosed with cancer, they thought they knew what to do next. They were, after all, executives at two of the premiere hospitals in the United States—Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic. But even decades of obsessing about…
