Prevalence of Frailty and Its Standardised Assessment Tools among Malaysian Older Person: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Frailty is conceptually defined as a state of increased vulnerability in older persons, resulting from age-associated declines in physiological reserve and function as they cope with everyday life stressors. To date, the prevalence of frailty has been assessed in various ways. The objective of this study was to identify the prevalence of the condition and the assessment tools used to determine its occurrence among Malaysian older individuals. A systematic literature search was performed on electronic bibliographic databases, namely, Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCOHost: MEDLINE Complete and Google Scholar. Ten eligible articles were reviewed and evaluated using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses and the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Frailty was diagnosed using Fried’s frailty phenotype and the Groningen Frailty Indicator (GFI). Assessment tools that included physical performance tests detected a lower prevalence of frailty than that determined using questionnaire-based tools. The prevalence of frailty ranged from as low as 6% to as high as 76%, and there was a higher prevalence among older persons living in aged care homes. This review suggests increasing prospective and interventional studies on frailty to establish a cause–effect relationship between standardised tools of assessing frailty and its prevalence among Malaysian older persons and provide guidelines for health professionals on promoting active lifestyles among older populations.