Assessment tools for intrinsic capacity in patients with stroke: A scoping review

Intrinsic capacity (IC), proposed by the World Health Organization in the World Report on Ageing and Health (2015), refers to the composite of all the physical and mental capacities that an individual can draw on at any point in time. The WHO Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) guidelines (2019) further operationalised IC into six domains: cognition, locomotion, vitality, vision, hearing and psychology. Stroke is a leading cause of adult disability worldwide. Patients with stroke frequently experience impairments across multiple domains of intrinsic capacity, and the pattern of impairment is highly heterogeneous. However, most existing IC assessment tools were developed for community-dwelling healthy older adults; direct application to stroke populations may introduce systematic bias owing to stroke-specific pathologies such as impaired consciousness, aphasia and unilateral spatial neglect. To date, no scoping review has systematically mapped the assessment tools used to evaluate intrinsic capacity in patients with stroke. This scoping review aims to systematically identify and map the tools used to assess intrinsic capacity in stroke patients, the ICOPE domains they cover, whether they are single-domain or multidimensional instruments, their target populations (acute vs. rehabilitation phase), and the reporting status of their measurement properties. Methods: This review follows the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis methodology for scoping reviews and is reported in accordance with PRISMA-ScR. Eligibility is defined using the Population-Concept-Context (PCC) framework. Eight Chinese and English databases (CNKI, Wanfang, VIP, SinoMed, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus) will be searched from 1 January 2015 to 1 January 2026. Two reviewers will independently screen studies and chart data.