Higher cystatin C, but not creatinine, predicts frailty risk in individuals with normal kidney function
Fan Zhang, Yue Xing, Yan Bai, Liuyan Huang, Yifei Zhong · 2026
Read Higher cystatin C, but not creatinine, predicts frailty risk in individuals with normal kidney function by Fan Zhang, Yue Xing, Yan Bai, Liuyan Huang, Yifei Zhong (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13571487.txt.
Description
Fan Zhang and four colleagues test two kidney markers as early warnings of frailty, in a 2026 study. They used two large aging cohorts, one American and one Chinese, and kept only people whose kidney function looked normal by the standard creatinine-based estimate. Frailty was scored from a broad index of health and function measures.
Creatinine itself showed no link to later frailty. Cystatin C told a different story: each unit increase came with about double the frailty risk in both cohorts, and the highest quarter of values carried clearly higher risk than the lowest. The authors suggest cystatin C can flag frailty risk even when standard kidney tests look fine.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Fan Zhang, Yue Xing, Yan Bai, Liuyan Huang, Yifei Zhong |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 36 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |