Geriatric Assessment Impairment Profiles and Mortality in Older Adults with Gastrointestinal Cancers: Latent Class Analysis of the CARE Registry.

BACKGROUND: Many older adults with cancer have ≥2 impairments on geriatric assessment which impacts present and future frailty status, treatment tolerability, and outcomes. Our objective was to identify and describe distinct geriatric assessment impairment classes using latent class analysis (LCA) in older patients with gastrointestinal malignancies and assess 1-year mortality. METHODS: We used the Cancer & Aging Resilience Evaluation (CARE) Study, a registry of older adults (≥60 years) at University of Alabama at Birmingham. The analytic cohort included patients with gastrointestinal malignancies who completed a self-administered geriatric assessment (CARE tool) before chemotherapy and had ≥1 geriatric assessment impairment. Thirteen geriatric assessment impairments were used as indicators in LCA. Resultant classes were described, mortality was estimated, and risk contrasts (differences, hazard ratios) were calculated with 95% confidence intervals. For comparison, estimates were provided for frailty categories (robust, pre-frail, frail) determined from 44 items in the CARE tool. Stratified analyses included high-risk (pancreatic, hepatobiliary, esophageal) vs. low-risk gastrointestinal cancers, and stage (IV vs. I-III). RESULTS: Six geriatric assessment impairment classes were identified: Mild impairment (LC1); Social support impairment (LC2); Weight loss alone (LC3); Impaired, low anxiety/depression (LC4); Impaired with anxiety/depression (LC5); Global impairment (LC6). One-year mortality was 14%, 22%, 29%, 34%, 50% and 50% for LC1-LC6, respectively. For frailty categories, estimates ranged from 18% (robust) to 40% (frail). In stratified analyses, LC4-LC6 consistently had higher mortality estimates compared to LC1. CONCLUSIONS: The 6 geriatric assessment impairment classes showed a wider spread of mortality estimates compared to frailty categories and could be used to identify vulnerable patients and to plan interventions.

Messages that matter: Age differences in affective responses to framed health messages.

Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decisions-are critical to understand yet relatively unexplored. Age-related emotional shifts toward positivity would be expected to differentially impact the affective responses of older and younger adults to framed messages. In this study, we measured the subjective and physiological affective responses of older and younger adults to gain- and loss-framed exercise promotion messages. Relative to older adults, younger adults exhibited greater negative reactivity to loss-framed health messages. These results suggest that health message framing does matter, but it depends on the age of the message recipient. (PsycINFO Database Record