Validation of the Comprehensive Frailty Assessment Instrument against the Tilburg Frailty Indicator

Purpose: Assessing the validity of the Comprehensive Frailty Assessment Instrument (CFAI) in comparison with the Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI). Background: When ageing, most individuals prefer to age in place even if they are frail. Detecting frail older persons in the community becomes a challenge for professionals and policymakers. Most international frailty instruments emphasize physical factors. The CFAI was developed from a multidimensional perspective, measuring a physical, a psychological, a social and an environmental domain and showed good validity and reliability. The novelty of the CFAI is the environmental domain, which is important because older people will highly depend on their environment when ageing in place. In this study, the CFAI is validated against the TFI. Design: Scale validation study. Methods: One hundred and seventy-eight respondents aged 60 and over participated in this study. Internal consistency and explained variance of the CFAI and the subscales was assessed. Next, the correlation between the two scales was evaluated. Convergent and divergent validity between the subscales of the CFAI and TFI was assessed. Results: The internal consistency of the CFAI was 0.759. The correlation between the CFAI and TFI was 0.590. Correlations between the physical, psychological and social domains of both scales was good and the environmental domain showed weak correlations with all other domains, pointing to convergent and divergent validity. Conclusion: The CFAI is found to be valid in comparison with the TFI and can be used by health care professionals for the detection of frail older people living in the community. (C) 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS and European Union Geriatric Medicine Society. All rights reserved.