Journal of the American Medical Directors Association
Brief ReportValidity and Responsiveness of the FRAIL Scale in a Longitudinal Cohort Study of Older Australian Women
Section snippets
Study Population
The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH) is a prospective nationwide study investigating factors related to the health and well-being initially of 3 cohorts of Australian women aged 18–23 years, aged 45–50 years, and aged 70–75 years at baseline in 1996. Women were randomly selected from the Medicare database, which covers all citizens and permanent residents of Australia, including refugees and immigrants. When first surveyed in 1996 (S1) 12,432 women born in 1921–1926
Results
The numbers of women who provided FRAIL score data at each survey and the proportion of women at each FRAIL6 score at each survey are presented in Figure 1. The figure shows that frailty increased with age (eg, the proportion of women who score a 4 or a 5 on the FRAIL6 scale increased from 5.6% for women aged 73–78 years to 16.2% for women aged 85–90 years).
Stronger correlations of frailty with IADLs were observed than of frailty with ADLs (Table 1). Slightly stronger correlations of frailty
Discussion
Frailty, as measured by the FRAIL scale was associated with increasing age and disability (ADLs and IADLs). The 6-item version of the FRAIL scale was responsive to changes in self-rated health in a population-based sample of older Australian women. Although previous studies have demonstrated the predictive validity of FRAIL scale in relation to new disability and mortality,3, 5, 11, 15, 16 this is the first study to assess responsiveness of the scale using longitudinal data and the impact of
Acknowledgments
The ALSWH was conceived and developed by groups of interdisciplinary researchers at the Universities of Newcastle and Queensland. The authors thank all participants for their valuable contribution to the study.
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This work was supported by the Australian Government Department of Health; and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (Center of Research Excellence #APP1000986). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.