The Clinical Frailty Scale version 2.0: Translation and defining reliability in Vietnamese older patients

The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) is a practical, reliable, and judgment-based tool among many instruments used for detecting frailty in older adults. However, the CFS has not yet been culturally adapted or validated in the Vietnamese language. This study aimed to translate the CFS into Vietnamese and evaluate the reliability of the Vietnamese CFS version in older adults. The prospective study recruited outpatients aged 60 years and older at a geriatric outpatient clinic of a public hospital in Vietnam between September 2022 and January 2023. The CFS version 2.0 was translated into Vietnamese following the guidelines of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcome Research Task Force for Translation and Cultural Adaptation. Weighted kappa was used to assess for agreement of inter-rater and test-retest reliability, while Kendall’s tau was applied to evaluate the correlation with other geriatric assessment-related characteristics. A total of 324 older participants were enrolled (mean age: 76±9 years) in the study. The CFS was successfully translated and culturally adapted into Vietnamese (CFS-VN). Overall, the CFS-VN demonstrated good inter-rater and test-retest reliability, with a weighted kappa of 0.808 (p<0.001) and 0.869 (p<0.001), respectively. The CFS-VN also showed a significant correlation with various geriatric assessments, including multimorbidity, polypharmacy, activities of daily living impairment, and instrumental activities of daily living impairment impairment. The Vietnamese version of CFS demonstrated satisfactory reliability for evaluating frailty in older patients. This tool has the potential to enhave the quality of care for rapidly aging population in Vietnam.