It was performed the analysis of the con- cept frailty in the elderly, through the following: selection of the concept, determination of the conceptual analysis goals, identification of possible uses of the concept; determination of critical or essential attributes (elements of differential diagnoses from the phenomenon), previous events (determinants of its occurrence) and concept consequences (events resulting from its presence).5
After selecting the concept to be analyzed and establishing the conceptual analysis goal (as expressed above), it was searched on health literature and through the website of the Health Virtual Library (BVS) studies published in the databases Latin American and Caribbean Litera- ture on Health Sciences (LILACS), the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), in Portuguese, English and Spanish languages between 2000 and 2009. They addressed in their titles aspects related to frailty in the elderly, available in full and for free on Internet. This pe- riod was selected due to the increase in the number of publications in the last decade, especially in the last years.
In order to locate this literature, it was used the key word frail elderly in English and anciano frágil in Spanish. This search led to the identification of 122 articles in LILACS database, 12 in SciELO database (which were repeated in LILACS and, then, disregarded) and 3781 in MEDLINE. In view of the large number of articles checked in MEDLINE, it was held a refinement of publications through the frail elderly descriptor combined with the syndrome word (term also used to name the phenomenon), and resulting in 147 articles. Considering the sum of the items located in LILACS and MEDLINE, it was found 269 articles that could potentially meet the inclu- sion criteria established. Once the articles were available, two tests of relevance were used to the selection of those ones that might be included in the sample: the test of relevance I, applied to the abstracts and test of relevance II, applied to the articles read in full.