Assessment of the performance of the SarQoL questionnaire in screening for sarcopenia in older people.

BACKGROUND

Because of its low prevalence and the need for physical tests to establish a diagnosis, recruiting sarcopenic people for clinical studies can be a resource-intensive process.

AIMS

We investigated whether the SarQoL, a 55-item questionnaire designed to measure quality of life in sarcopenia, could be used to identify older people with a high likelihood of being sarcopenic, and to compare its performance to the SARC-F tool.

METHODS

We performed a secondary analysis of data from older, community-dwelling participants of the SarcoPhAge study, evaluated for sarcopenia according to the EWGSOP2 criteria, and who completed the SarQoL and SARC-F questionnaires. We determined the optimal threshold to distinguish between sarcopenic and non-sarcopenic people with the Youden index. Screening performance was evaluated with the area under the curve (AUC) and by calculating sensitivity and specificity.

RESULTS

The analysis of 309 participants provided an optimal threshold value of ≤ 52.4 points for identifying people with sarcopenia with the SarQoL questionnaire, which resulted in a sensitivity of 64.7% (41.1-84.2%), a specificity of 80.5% (75.7-84.7%) and an AUC of 0.771 (0.652-0.889). Compared to the SARC-F, the SarQoL has greater sensitivity (64.7% vs 52.39%), but slightly lower specificity (80.5% vs. 86.6%).

DISCUSSION

The SarQoL questionnaire showed acceptable screening accuracy, on par with the SARC-F. The optimal threshold of ≤ 52.4 points should be confirmed in other cohorts of older people.

CONCLUSIONS

This exploratory study showed that the SarQoL could potentially be applied in a screening strategy, with the added benefit of providing a measure of QoL at the same time.