[Assessment of comorbidity in elderly]

Abstract

The objective was to offer to the clinical researchers who work on elderly and health field a review of the main instruments use for assessment the presence of comorbidity in elderly. A systematic quest at Medline using keywords was made. A group of experts on geriatric and internal medicine physicians was integrated for the evaluation of paper found. The group analyzed the structure, clinical utility, clinimetrics properties, focus on elderly patients. This communication included the four main tools: Charlson's comorbidity index, Geriatric index of comorbidity, Kaplan-Feinstein's index and Cumulative Illness Rating Scale-Geriatric (CIRS-G). Each of them showed adequate clinometric properties, although, the assessment of CIRS-G requires a health professional more skilled on clinical examination, all of these indexes have been shown to have a good predictive value about functional impairment and mortality. However, the choice of the index by researchers depends on the context of the study.