Frailty in Primary Care: Validation of the simplified Zulfiqar Frailty Scale (sZFS)

Abstract

Introduction: Frailty scales are used very rarely by general practitioners as they are time consuming and are not well-adapted to current needs. Thus, we have designed with general practitioners a new scale for the early and rapid detection of frailty syndrome, called the simplified Zulfiqar Frailty Scale (sZFS). Patients and methods: This scale was tested in two general medicine practices in Normandy (France) for a total of six months and compared to the GFST tool “The Gerontopole Frailty Screening Tool”. Only patients who were over 65 years old with an ADL ≥ 4/6 were included. Results: 107 were patients included in the general medicine practice, with an average age of 74 years. The sZFS questionnaire has a shorter administration time than the GFST questionnaire (p < 0.001). Its sensitivity is of 93%, and its specificity is 58%. Its positive predictive value is 57%, and its negative predictive value is 93%. The area under the curve of the sZFS scale is 0.83 [0.76; 0.91] (IC95%). Conclusion: Our frailty screening scale is simple, relevant, and quick.

Zulfiqar Frailty Scale (ZFS): Concordance Study with the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS)

“…We developed a frailty screening tool that standardizes professional procedures and makes it possible for general practitioners to detect frailty in their elderly patients. The results of this study are very satisfactory and similar to previous studies [8][9][10]: in fact, the correlations between the Zulfiqar scale (and the simplified scale) and other frailty scales are very satisfactory [14][15][16][17][18]. In addition, the areas under the curve ranged from 0.70 to 0.94.…”