Dear Colleagues

It is our hope that we will be able to hold the deferred 2020 OPDN meeting at King’s College, London later this year.

If the COVID-19 restrictions have been sufficiently lifted to allow us to host the event, we will confirm in September .

The purpose of this brief communication is to make you aware of the EU-funded DiabFrail Latam project which follows on from the work of the European-wide MIDFRAIL study that Diabetes Frail was previously involved with.

You will remember that the Midfrail study looked at the benefits of a multimodal intervention (optimising medical care, dietary education, resistance exercise) in older people with diabetes and frailty.

After one year of treatment there were significant positive changes in physical performance and that this has now been shown to be cost-effective, mainly through reduced hospitalisation.

The DiabFrail Latam project, which began in January 2019, is a scaling up project that duplicates the intervention in older people with diabetes and frailty in Latin America (Chile, Peru, Mexico, Colombia).

This is an exciting development in the arena that links diabetes to frailty but attempts to demonstrate that by successful intervention, we can hope for reversal of negative changes in physical performance.

Kind regards

Professor Alan Sinclair