Comparison of Diagnostic Accuracies of Frailty Assessment Tools for Frailty in Older People

Background: Frailty has become one of the most serious global public health challenges. Whether the assessments tools of frailty are useful needs to be elucidated. Objectives This study aims to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of measurement tools for frailty in older people. Design This study was registered on PROSPERO (registration number: CRD: 42023415074.) Medline, Web of Science, Embase, China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database (CNKI), Wanfang databases, and VIP databases were searched from their inception to March 31, 2022. Measurements Two reviewers independently assessed the quality of the included studies based on the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies 2(QUADAS-2) tool in Review manager 5.4.1 software. Besides, a summary receiver operating characteristics (SROC) curve was plotted and area under curve (AUC) was calculated to evaluate the accuracy of the frailty assessment tool. Results A total of 23 articles were included. The sample size ranges from 7060(range:45-1037).We used the Fried phenotype(FP) scale as a reference standard. The pooled sensitivity, specificity and AUC of FRAIL was 0.75 (95% Confidence Interval 0.56–0.88), 0.81 (95% CI: 0.71–0.88) and 0.88 (95% CI: 0.85–0.91), respectively; the pooled sensitivity, specificity and AUC of PRISMA-7 scale was 0.81 (95% CI: 0.71–0.88), 0.78 (95% CI: 0.69–0.85) and 0.86 (95% CI: 0.82–0.88), respectively; the pooled sensitivity, specificity and AUC of GFI was 0.72 (95% CI: 0.62–0.80), 0.74 (95% CI: 0.67–0.81) and AUC of 0.79 (95% CI: 0.76–0.83), respectively. Conclusion Our study suggests that, compared with the FP scale, the FRAIL and PRISMA-7 scales have a wide range of applications in the frail older population.