Validation study of Gerontopole Frailty Screening Tool
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Validation study of Gerontopole Frailty Screening Tool
IRAS ID
138339
Contact name
Helen Roberts
Contact email
Research summary
The Gerontopole Frailty Screening Tool (GFST)is specifically focused at targeting frailty in community-dwelling older persons with the aim of preventing incident disability and has been developed in Toulouse (France).The GFST is designed to be used by general practitioners and applied to older persons (aged 65 years and older) with no physical disability or acute clinical disease. It comprises 6 questions about a patient’s functional status followed by a second part in which the general practitioner expresses his/her own view about the frailty status of that individual. In the present project, we propose to formally validate the GFST in several European languages in primary care against the widely used Fried Frailty score, which has shown to be highly predictive of negative outcomes (e.g., disability, hospitalization, institutionalization, death) in community-dwelling older persons. The frailty phenotype proposed by Fried and colleagues is constituted by five criteria: 1) involuntary weight loss, 2) exhaustion, 3) sedentary behavior, 4) slow gait speed, and 5) poor handgrip strength. Patients would be assessed in the GP surgery and the assessment would take around 20 minutes. The project represents a preliminary phase of the activities promoted by the European Union Geriatric Medicine Society (EUGMS) working group on frailty, which is aimed at developing shared and evidence-guided preventive actions against disability in Europe.
REC name
North East - Tyne & Wear South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/NE/0371
Date of REC Opinion
6 Jan 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion