Functional category, physical frailty, and sarcopenia in older adults with diabetes mellitus: a cross-sectional study

Aims: To describe how a three-level functional category (DAFS-8; lower categories indicating better function) overlaps with physical frailty and sarcopenia in older outpatients with diabetes, and to explore whether their combination provides clinically interpretable risk stratification for prioritizing care. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of 122 outpatients aged ≥ 65 years. Physical frailty was defined by the revised Japanese Cardiovascular Health Study (J-CHS) phenotype, and sarcopenia/possible sarcopenia by the AWGS 2019 criteria. Discriminative performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses and rule-based performance metrics. Results: , Conclusions: triage perspective for prioritizing interventions in routine outpatient care. These findings illustrate how multiple geriatric "measuring sticks" capture distinct but overlapping segments of this heterogeneous population.