Objective: To develop a method of functional classification of the elderly (FCE) in Primary Health Care and to define the age limit for considering someone "a frail elderly person."
Design: A descriptive study in two phases: a) the method's design by means of "brainwriting" and b) the evaluation of the method in a descriptive crossover study.
Setting: A rural medical consulting-room.
Patients and other participants: The research team, in the design of the method; and the elderly population attending for health care (n = 131), in the method's evaluation.
Measurements and main results: The FCE method was based on the Katz (IK) and Lawton-Brodie (IL-B) indices and classified the patients as independent and at different levels of disability. Urinary incontinence (UI) was excluded from the IK. 85.4% of the patients were independent, which bore relation to age (p < 0.001), but not to gender. When UI was included in the IK, the number of people classified as disabled increased by 32% (CI 95%, 23-41%) over when it was not included. Yet 80% of patients with UI were independent. No differences in the percentage of disabled patients were observed when the cut-off age for detecting disabled patients varied from 75 to 80.
Conclusions: The inclusion of UI as a negative factor in the IK gives rise to overestimates of the number of disabled people. In our study the data suggested that the age for considering an elderly person as 'frail' should be 80.