The investigation of clinical issues related to aging poses specific challenges because the most critical health conditions in older adults result from a complex interaction between multiple etiologic and modifying factors.1,2 For example, the nearly inevitable presence of multimorbidity (diabetes, chronic renal failure, arrhythmias) and geriatric syndromes (lack of social support, cognitive impairment, urinary incontinence, instability, and falls) can hinder studies of a specific clinical condition such as high blood pressure.3 In this context, network analysis is a research approach that can describe, explore, and understand the simultaneous connections among several aspects related to one or more health conditions.4-6 This method uses graphic representations to illustrate connections between multiple factors, which allows investigators to analyze multiple simultaneous associations between variables in a manner hardly possible with other statistical techniques.2,6
