AUTHOR=Granata Nicolò , Vigoré Martina , Steccanella Andrea , Ranucci Luca , Sarzi Braga Simona , Baiardi Paola , Pierobon Antonia 

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Medicine

VOLUME=Volume 9 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2022.967952

DOI=10.3389/fmed.2022.967952

ISSN=2296-858X

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 determine the impact of this tool when dealing with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).
Methods: An electronic literature search was performed on PubMed, Medline, 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 (34.88%), and half of the studies were focused on cardiovascular diseases (48.84%), followed by cancer (23.26%), and diabetes (11.63%).  Simplicity (32.56%), efficacy (30.23%), and rapidity (13.95%) 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 (34.88%), with clinical decision making (11.63%) and, with the presence of the disease (11.63%). Furthermore, CFS resulted as a predictor of life expectancy in 15 studies (34.88%), clinical outcomes in 8 studies (18.60%), and hospital admissions/readmissions in 4 studies (9.30%).
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.