Make time for gait speed: vital to staging the aging

In this issue of Blood, Liu and colleagues demonstrate that gait speed is a valuable predictor of outcomes in older adults with hematologic malignancies, independent of age, performance status, comorbidities, aggressiveness of malignancy, and treatment type.(1) Four hundred forty-eight adults with hematologic malignancies aged 75 years and older underwent geriatric screening at their initial consultation, including gait speed and grip strength testing, cognitive screening, and 2 frailty measures. The authors showed that gait speed predicted unplanned hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and survival, with each 0.1-m/s decrease in gait speed increasing mortality by 20%.