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.