Vulnerable Elderly Survey 13 as a screening method for frailty in Polish elderly surgical patient--prospective study.

UNLABELLED

The Vulnerable Elders Survey (VES-13) is a simple function based frailty screening tool that can be also administered by the nonclinical personnel within 5 minutes and has been validated in the out- and in patient clinic and acute medical care settings. The aim of the study was to validate the accuracy of the VES-13 screening method for predicting the frailty syndrome based on a CGA in polish surgical patients.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

We included prospectively 106 consecutive patients ≥65, that qualify for abdominal surgery (both due to oncological and benign reasons), at the tertiary referral hospital.We evaluated the diagnostic performance of VES-13 score comparing to the results from the CGA, accepted as the gold standard for identifying at risk frail elderly patients.

RESULTS

The prevalence of frailty as diagnosed by CGA was 59.4%. There was significantly higher number of frail patients in the oncological group (78% vs. 31%; p<0.01). According to the frailty screening methods, the frailty prevalence was 45.3%. The VES-13 score had a 60% sensitivity and 78% specificity in detecting frailty syndrome. The positive and negative predictive value was 81% and 57%, respectively. The overall predictive capacity was intermediate (AUC=0.69) CONCLUSIONS: At present, the VES-13 screening tool for older patients cannot replace the comprehensive geriatric assessment; this is due to the insufficient discriminative power to select patients for further assessment. It might be helpful in a busy clinical practice and in facilities that do not have trained personal for geriatric assessment.