Methods for evaluating the frailty syndrome in elderly people with diabetes: an integrative review

This study aims to synthesize the available knowledge about the methods used to assess frailty syndrome in elderly people with diabetes in the community. This is an integrative review of the literature carried out in the LILACS, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and Scopus databases. A total of 19 articles were included, categorized based on the type of instrument: unidimensional, which includes only the physical elements of frailty, and multidimensional, which incorporates the cognitive and psychosocial domains. Frailty was found to be present in all the articles included, ranging from 28.2% to 80% for unidimensional instruments and 9.4% to 46.2% for multidimensional instruments. Scientific evidence has demonstrated that there is a clear distinction between the various instruments analyzed and, depending on the reality to be applied, the cut-off points for the items that comprise the frailty scales should be adapted to the study population. In view of this, further studies are needed to investigate simpler methods for identifying frailty syndrome that facilitate its use in primary health care, in order to identify the risk of developing frailty early on, as it is the gateway of the health system responsible for the close and longitudinal monitoring of elderly people.