15th International Congress of the European Geriatric Medicine Society, Krakow, Poland, 25 - 27 September 2019, pp.280
Introduction: The physical phenotype of frailty, described by Fried et. al, shows significant overlap with sarcopenia. EWGSOP2 recommends primarly measuring hand grip strenght (HGS) to detect sarcopenic cases. Considering common features between both conditions, we aimed to investigate whether HGS measurment could also be a reliable value to identify frailty.
Methods: Community-dwelling older adults aged C 65 years applied to the geriatric outpatient clinic were enrolled to the study. Frailty was assesed by modified Fried scale and HGS were performed by Jamar hand dynamometer.
Results: 454 patients were included (70.7% female, 29.3% male; mean age: 74.5 ± 6.6 years). 97 (21.3%) were frail according to Fried index. HGS value for men cut off B 28 kg presented the best balance between sensitivity and specificity (sensitivity: 76.9% vs specificity: 78.8%) to identify frailty (AUC = 0.860; 95% Cl: 0.78–0.91, p\0.0001). HGS value for women cut off B 18 kg presented the best balance between sensitivity and specificity (sensitivity: 79.8% vs specificity: 81.2%) to identify frailty (AUC = 0.877; 95% Cl: 0.83–0.91, p\0.0001).
Conclusion: We suggest that HGS cut off for men B 28 kg and HGS cut off for women B 18 kg can be used to screen for frailty. In daily geriatric practice measuring HGS can help to identify frailty.