The potential of the SARC-CalF questionnaire as a screening tool for frailty
Öz
Purpose: Frailty and sarcopenia exhibit overlapping physical characteristics, as described by the Fried Frailty Phenotype (FFP). Although the SARC-CalF questionnaire is widely used for sarcopenia screening, as recommended by the EWGSOP-2 guidelines, its potential to identify frailty has not been thoroughly investigated. This study aims to evaluate the SARC-CalF as a simple, objective tool for assessing frailty in older adults.
Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study included 337 patients aged 65 years and older. Frailty was assessed through the FFP. Demographic characteristics and the SARC-CalF questionnaire were obtained. To identify appropriate SARC-CalF cut-off points for detecting frailty, we used a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve to calculate the area under the curve (AUC) and its 95% confidence interval.
Results: The average age of the participants was 75.27±6.6, with 64.3% (n=217) being women. Frailty was observed in 15.4 % (n=52) of the study population. Frail patients exhibited higher median SARC-CalF scores than non-frail participants (5.5 vs. 1). The AUC of the SARC-CalF score for frailty was 0.800 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.75-0.84). Using a cut-off value of >2, sensitivity was 84.6%, specificity was 66.3%, PPV was 30.7%, and NPV was 96.1%.
Conclusion: The SARC-CalF questionnaire demonstrated good discriminative performance in identifying frailty among older adults and may serve as a simple tool for frailty screening.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Kaynakça
- Fried LP, Tangen CM, Walston J, Newman AB, Hirsch C, Gottdiener J et al. Frailty in older adults: evidence for a phenotype. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2001;56:M146-M57.
- Clegg A, Young J, Iliffe S, Rikkert MO, Rockwood K. Frailty in elderly people. Lancet. 2013;381:752-62.
- Morley JE, Vellas B, Van Kan GA, Anker SD, Bauer JM, Bernabei R et al. Frailty consensus: a call to action. J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2013;14:392-7.
- Walston J, Hadley EC, Ferrucci L, Guralnik JM, Newman AB, Studenski SA et al. Research agenda for frailty in older adults: toward a better understanding of physiology and etiology: summary from the American Geriatrics Society/National Institute on Aging Research Conference on Frailty in Older Adults. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2006;54:991-1001.
- Cruz-Jentoft AJ, Bahat G, Bauer J, Boirie Y, Bruyère O, Cederholm T et al. Sarcopenia: revised European consensus on definition and diagnosis. Age Ageing. 2019;48:16-31.
- Kawakami R, Murakami H, Sanada K, Tanaka N, Sawada SS, Tabata I et al. Calf circumference as a surrogate marker of muscle mass for diagnosing sarcopenia in Japanese men and women. Geriatr Gerontol Int. 2015;15:969-76.
- Krzymińska-Siemaszko R, Deskur-Śmielecka E, Kaluźniak-Szymanowska A, Lewandowicz M, Wieczorowska-Tobis K. Comparison of diagnostic performance of SARC-F and its two modified versions (SARC-CalF and SARC-F+EBM) in community-dwelling older adults from Poland. Clin Interv Aging. 2020;15:583-94.
- Barbosa-Silva TG, Menezes AM, Bielemann RM, Malmstrom TK, Gonzalez MC. Enhancing SARC-F: improving sarcopenia screening in the clinical practice. J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2016;17:1136-41.
- Kerminen H, Jyväkorpi S, Urtamo A, Huhtala H, Öhman H, Calvani R et al. Performance of the SARC-F, SARC-CalF, and calf circumference for sarcopenia case finding in community-dwelling older adults. Eur Geriatr Med. 2024;15:1817-26.
- Bahat G, Tufan A, Tufan F, Kilic C, Akpinar TS, Kose M et al. Cut-off points to identify sarcopenia according to European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People (EWGSOP) definition. Clin Nutr. 2016;35:1557-63.
