An Artificial Neural Network Model to Assess Nutritional Factors Associated with Frailty in the Aging Population from Southern Italy

Machine Learning could help the healthcare industry manage huge amounts of data and discover hidden trends and patterns that could help us better understand disease development and treatment. The goal is to define a Neural Network model (NN) to classify physical frailty in aging cohort to identify the frail food and clinical profile. In a 1, 929 older cohort from Southern Italy, the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) and clinical data were collected with blood tests. A NN was built with a hyperparameter tuning technique using accuracy as a performance parameter to select the best model. Confusion matrices, Garson and Olden’s variable importance were evaluated. Older age, female gender, high BMI, and high blood pressure were associated with physical frailty. In frail subjects, the lipid profile and RBC levels were significantly lower than their counterpart. On the contrary, serum levels of interleukin-6 and CRP were higher in the frail group. Frail subjects show higher consumption of spaghetti soup, pecorino cheese, fennel and chocolate, while a lower consumption of ham. The NN model has a respective training and testing accuracy of 86.49% and 85.77%. NN performs well on the train. The test dataset makes few mistakes and can predict healthy subjects with high specificity. According to Garson’s method, age, gender, foods rich in fats, and smoking habits are essential in predicting the frailty condition. In contrast, Olden’s method underlined the higher consumption of legumes and unrefined cereals.