Medical research often defines a person as elderly when they are 65 years of age or above, however defining elderly\nage by chronology alone has its limitations. Moreover, potential variability in definitions of elderly age can make\ninterpretation of the collective body of evidence within a particular field of research confusing. Our research goals\nwere to (1) evaluate published orthopaedic research and determine whether there is variability in proposed definitions\nof an elderly person, and (2) to determine whether variability exists within the important research sub-group of\nhip fractures. A defined search protocol was used within PubMed, EMBASE and the Cochrane Library that identified\northopaedic research articles published in 2012 that stated within their objective, intent to examine an intervention\nin an elderly population. 80 studies that included 271,470 patients were identified and subject to analysis. Four (5 %)\nstudies failed to define their elderly population. The remaining 76 (95 %) studies all defined elderly age by chronology\nalone. Definitions of an elderly person ranged from 50 to 80 years and above. The most commonly used age to\ndefine an elderly person was 65, however this accounted for only 38 (47.5 %) of studies. Orthopedic research appears\nto favor defining elderly age by chronology alone, and there is considerable heterogeneity amongst these definitions.\nThis may confuse interpretation of the evidence base in areas of orthopaedic research that focus on elderly patients.\nThe findings of this study underline the importance of future research in orthopaedics adopting validated frailty index\nmeasures so that population descriptions in older patients are more uniform and clinically relevant.
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