French translation and validation of the sarcopenia screening tool SARC-F

Abstract

Introduction: The purpose of the present study is to translate and validate into French the SARC-F questionnaire, a simple and easy screening tool for sarcopenia. Materials and methods: The translation process has been divided into two consecutive parts: (1) the translation of the questionnaire from English to French and its language validation (inter-rater reliability and test–retest reliability); (2) the clinical validation of the French SARC-F to assess its performance (sensitivity, specificity, predictive positive value and predictive negative value) in a cohort of elderly Belgian subjects against 7 existing definitions of sarcopenia. Results: The translated French version of the SARC-F demonstrated an excellent inter-rater reliability, with an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.90 (95% CI 0.76–0.96), as well as excellent test–retest reliability, with an ICC of 0.86 (95% CI 0.66–0.94). Afterwards, 306 subjects took part in the clinical validation of the French version of the SARC-F questionnaire. The results showed that sensitivity of the tool ranged from 22.1 to 75.0%, depending on the definition used for the diagnosis of sarcopenia, and the specificity ranged from 84.9 to 87.1%. Moreover, all positive predictive values were always below 50%; the lowest negative predictive value was 68.1%, and the best one reached approximately 99%. Conclusions: The results are in line with the psychometric performance found in the initial English validation of the SARC-F and seem to indicate that this screening tool can detect with precision the absence of sarcopenia, but seems less precise in affirming the presence of this geriatric syndrome.