increased intraindividual variability in several biological parameters is associated with aspects of frailty and may reflect impaired physiological regulation. As frailty involves a cumulative decline in multiple physiological systems, we aimed to estimate the overall regulatory capacity by applying a principal component analysis to such variability. The variability of 20 blood-based parameters was evaluated as the log-transformed coefficient of variation (LCV) for one year's worth of data from 580 hemodialysis patients. All the LCVs were positively correlated with each other and shared common characteristics. In a principal component analysis of 19 LCVs, the first principal component (PC1) explained 27.7% of the total variance, and the PC1 score exhibited consistent correlations with diverse negative health indicators, including diabetes, hypoalbuminemia, hyponatremia, and relative hypocreatininemia. the relationship between the PC1 score and frailty was subsequently examined in a subset of the subjects. The PC1 score was associated with the prevalence of frailty and was an independent predictor for frailty (odds ratio per SD: 2.31, P = 0.01) using a multivariate logistic regression model, which showed good discrimination (c-statistic: 0.85). Therefore, the PC1 score represents principal information shared by biomarker variabilities and is a reasonable measure of homeostatic dysregulation and frailty. Studies on variability in blood pressure, plasma glucose levels, hemoglobin concentration, and other parameters have commonly reported associations with adverse outcomes 1-3. In our previous study examining patients receiving maintenance hemodialysis (HD), variability in many other blood-based laboratory parameters was also related to several adverse conditions, such as impaired mobility, hospital admission, increased mortality, and hypoalbuminemia 4. These conditions are in fact elements of frailty, and frailty is considered to be a state of functional decline in many physiological systems 5. Therefore, we speculated that the variability in laboratory parameters may reflect the dysfunction of corresponding regulatory systems and may also be a measure of frailty. Consistent with this idea, the variability of serum albumin concentrations increases with ageing, and this movement accelerates prior to death 6. Others have also suggested a link between physiological regulation and variability in other biological variables 7-10. However, the variability of a single parameter may not properly represent the dysregulation across multiple physiological systems in frailty 11. To develop a comprehensive measure of physiological dysregulation that is consistent with the concept of frailty, we applied a principal component analysis (PCA) to a set of variabilities in laboratory parameters. This procedure, performed on all study participants (n = 580), yielded principal component scores (PC scores) for