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

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 SARCF 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.