Habit Formation Intervention to Reduce Frailty Risk Factors: A Feasibility Study

Abstract

Importance: Frailty is common, detrimental, and costly in later life. Interventions can reduce the risk for frailty.

Objective: To assess the feasibility of a frailty prevention intervention.

Design: A two-arm, prospective randomized controlled trial with blinded participant allocation and data collection at baseline and 1 wk postintervention by data collectors blinded to participant assignment.

Setting: Community.

Participants: Thirty community-dwelling, English-speaking, older African-Americans who were classified as prefrail were randomly recruited from a university research subject registry.

Intervention: The habit formation treatment was delivered face to face during 12 weekly home-based sessions approximately 45 min in length.

Outcomes and measures: We assessed feasibility as reflected in participant recruitment, retention, session attendance, and program satisfaction. Clinical outcomes included sedentary time and dietary quality (primary) as well as frailty status, physical activity, physical function, depression, quality of life, and anthropometry (secondary). Habit formation (mechanism of change) was assessed in the treatment group only.

Results: Twenty women (M age = 73.5 yr) completed the study. The recruitment rate was 69.8%, and we retained 95.2% of participants through the end of the study, with session attendance rates of 98.1% and 88.6% for the treatment and control groups, respectively, and mean acceptability scores of 30.3 and 28.0 for the treatment and control groups, respectively. Changes in primary and secondary clinical outcomes were largely in the expected direction.

Conclusions and relevance: The intervention was feasible to deliver. Although future efficacy studies are needed, our preliminary data suggest the potential of an occupational therapy intervention to reduce frailty risk. What This Article Adds: Although it may be possible to slow or prevent the progression to frailty by modifying existing habits and occupations, few occupational therapy interventions address frailty. Our data provide new and much-needed insights about the potential feasibility of an occupational therapy intervention to reduce frailty risk.