==== Front Innov Aging Innov Aging innovateage Innovation in Aging 2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 10.1093/geroni/igaa057.1692 igaa057.1692 Abstracts Session 3023 (Paper) Cardiovascular Health and Disease (paper) AcademicSubjects/SOC02600 The Association Between Myocardial Strain and Frailty in the Cardiovascular Health Study Tan Annabel 1 Shah Sanjiv J 2 Sanders Jason 3 Psaty Bruce 4 Newman Anne 5 Wu Chenkai 6 Gardin Julius 7 Odden Michelle 8 1 Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States 2 Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, United States 3 Brigham And Women’s Hospital, Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States 4 University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States 5 University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States 6 Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Jiangsu, China 7 Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Hackensack, New Jersey, United States 8 Stanford University, STANFORD, California, United States 2020 16 12 2020 16 12 2020 4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”524 525 © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract Myocardial strain, measured by speckle tracking echocardiography (STE), is a novel measure of subclinical cardiovascular disease and may reflect myocardial aging. We aimed to explore the association between myocardial strain and frailty, a clinical syndrome of impaired resilience and lack of physiologic reserve. Frailty was defined in 4,042 participants of the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) as having 3 or more of the following clinical criteria: weakness, slowness, shrinking, exhaustion, and inactivity. We examined the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of left ventricular (LV) longitudinal strain, LV early diastolic strain rate and left atrial reservoir strain with frailty in participants with no history of cardiovascular disease or heart failure at the time of echocardiography. In cross-sectional analyses, LV longitudinal strain, LV early diastolic strain, left atrial reservoir strain and LV ejection fraction (measured by conventional echocardiography) levels were lower (worse) among frail participants than among those who were not frail and pre-frail (p<0.01). This association of LV longitudinal strain and frailty was robust to adjustment by LV ejection fraction (adjusted OR: 1.34, 95% CI: 1.20, 2.09). Conversely, LV ejection fraction was not associated with frailty after adjustment for LV longitudinal strain. In longitudinal analyses, LV longitudinal strain and LV early diastolic strain were associated with incident frailty (adjusted OR: 1.49, 95% CI: 1.07, 2.08) and 1.65, 95% CI: 1.15, 2.25, respectively). In community-dwelling older adults without prevalent cardiovascular disease, worse LV longitudinal strain, reflective of subclinical myocardial dysfunction, was associated with frailty independent of LV ejection fraction and other risk factors.