$800,000 dedicated to frailty and COVID-19 research
The Canadian Frailty Network and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research-Institute of Aging have come together, providing $800,000 to fund six projects focused on investigating the interaction between frailty and COVID-19 in older adults. As we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, older adults living with frailty have been disproportionately affected with devastating impacts. Though there is ongoing research that addresses COVID-19 in older Canadians, this funding will fill the gap in COVID-19 research which is yet to address frailty specifically.
In Canada today, one in every four Canadians between the ages of 65-84 years is considered medically frail (1.5 million older adults), and by age 85 that number increases to 50 per cent. As Canada’s only research network focused on frailty and vulnerable older adults, CFN’s mission is to improve care for older Canadians living with frailty and their family caregivers through research, knowledge translation, training of the next generation of health care providers and health promotion messaging such as the AVOID frailty program.
Congratulations to the teams receiving funding!
- Developing a Frailty Cohort in the Ontario COVID-19 Prospective Cohort Study–$183,231
- Principal Investigator: Amol Verma, MD, MPhil — University of Toronto
- Population-estimable frailty using ‘big data’ to predict Covid-19 infection and illness severity–$185,459
- Principal Investigator: Douglas Lee, MD, FRCPC, PhD – Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences
- Exploring the care needs of Canadians living with frailty and the role of primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic–$85,500
- Principal Investigators: Paul Stolee, PhD, MPA — University of Waterloo, Sara Mallinson, PhD–University of Calgary; Anik Giguere, PhD — Université Laval
- Frailty & the Incidence and Course of COVID-19 among 500,000 Older Adults in the UK BIOBANK–$118,377
- Principal Investigator: Esme Fuller-Thomson, PhD, M.S.W., Karen Davison, Ph.D.–University of Toronto
- COVID-19 Associated Outcomes of Critical Illness in Patients with Frailty–$46,194
- Principal Investigator: Rewa Oleksa, MD, Darryl Rolfson, MD, Sean Bagshaw, MD, FRCPC, Carmel Montgomery–University of Alberta
- Assessing the association between frailty and outcome of COVID-19 infection–$132,644
- Principal Investigator: Allison McGeer, MsC, MD, FRCPC, Melissa Andrew, MD, Andrew Simor, MD –Sinai Health Systems (Toronto)
Click here to read more about the competition.