The potential of the SARC-CalF questionnaire as a screening tool for frailty

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.