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. 2022 Aug 16:9:967952.
doi: 10.3389/fmed.2022.967952. eCollection 2022.

The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) employment in the frailty assessment of patients suffering from Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs): A systematic review

Nicolò Granata  1 , Martina Vigoré  2 , Andrea Steccanella  2 , Luca Ranucci  2 , Simona Sarzi Braga  3 , Paola Baiardi  4 , Antonia Pierobon  2
Affiliations

The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) employment in the frailty assessment of patients suffering from Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs): A systematic review

Nicolò Granata et al. Front Med (Lausanne). .

Abstract

Background: The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) is a well-established tool that has been widely employed to assess patients' frailty status and to predict clinical outcomes in the acute phase of a disease, but more information is needed to define the implications that this tool have when dealing with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).

Methods: An electronic literature search was performed on PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, Web of Science, and EBSCO databases to identify studies employing the CFS to assess frailty in patients with NCDs.

Findings: After database searching, article suitability evaluation, and studies' quality assessment, 43 studies were included in the systematic review. Researches were conducted mostly in Japan (37.5%), and half of the studies were focused on cardiovascular diseases (46.42%), followed by cancer (25.00%), and diabetes (10.71%). Simplicity (39.29%), efficacy (37.5%), and rapidity (16.07%) were the CFS characteristics mostly appreciated by the authors of the studies. The CFS-related results indicated that its scores were associated with patients' clinical outcomes (33.92%), with the presence of the disease (12.5%) and, with clinical decision making (10.71%). Furthermore, CFS resulted as a predictor of life expectancy in 23 studies (41.07%), clinical outcomes in 12 studies (21.43%), and hospital admissions/readmissions in 6 studies (10.71%).

Discussion: CFS was found to be a well-established and useful tool to assess frailty in NCDs, too. It resulted to be related to the most important disease-related clinical characteristics and, thus, it should be always considered as an important step in the multidisciplinary evaluation of frail and chronic patients.

Systematic review registration: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.asp? PROSPERO 2021, ID: CRD42021224214.

Keywords: Clinical Frailty Scale; Non-Communicable Diseases; chronic diseases; frailty; systematic review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
PRISMA Flow Diagram of the systematic review.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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