Department of Clinical and Lifespan Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.
Laboratory of Neurochemistry and Behavior, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Int J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2018 Jul;33(7):941-947. doi: 10.1002/gps.4875. Epub 2018 Apr 10.
Cognitive frailty is characterized by the presence of cognitive impairment in exclusion of dementia. In line with other frailty domains, cognitive frailty is associated with negative outcomes. The Comprehensive Frailty Assessment Instrument (CFAI) measures 4 domains of frailty, namely physical, psychological, social, and environmental frailty. The absence of cognitive frailty is a limitation.
An expert panel selected 6 questions from the Informant Questionnaire on Cognitive Decline that were, together with the CFAI and the Montreal cognitive assessment administered to 355 older community dwelling adults (mean age = 77).
After multivariate analysis, 2 questions were excluded. All the questions from the original CFAI were implemented in a principal component analysis together with the 4 cognitive questions, showing that the 4 cognitive questions all load on 1 factor, representing the cognitive domain of frailty. By adding the cognitive domain to the CFAI, the reliability of the adapted CFAI (CFAI-Plus), remains good (Cronbach's alpha: .767).
This study showed that cognitive frailty can be added to the CFAI without affecting its good psychometric properties. In the future, the CFAI-Plus needs to be validated in an independent cohort, and the interaction with the other frailty domains needs to be studied.
认知脆弱是指认知障碍的存在，排除痴呆症。与其他脆弱领域一致，认知脆弱与负面结果相关。综合脆弱评估工具（CFAI）测量了脆弱的 4 个领域，即身体、心理、社会和环境脆弱。缺乏认知脆弱是一个局限性。
一个专家小组从认知衰退知情者问卷中选择了 6 个问题，这些问题与 CFAI 和蒙特利尔认知评估一起被用于 355 名居住在社区的老年人（平均年龄=77 岁）。
经过多变量分析，有 2 个问题被排除。原始 CFAI 的所有问题都与 4 个认知问题一起进行了主成分分析，结果表明，4 个认知问题都加载在 1 个因子上，代表认知脆弱领域。通过将认知领域添加到 CFAI 中，改良后的 CFAI（CFAI-Plus）的可靠性仍然良好（克朗巴赫系数：.767）。
这项研究表明，认知脆弱可以添加到 CFAI 中，而不会影响其良好的心理测量特性。未来，CFAI-Plus 需要在独立队列中进行验证，并需要研究与其他脆弱领域的相互作用。
