Although frailty status greatly impacts health care in countries with rapidly aging populations, little is known about the frailty status in Chinese older adults.

Given the increased health care needs associated with frailty, we sought to develop an easily applied self-report screening tool based on four of the syndromic frailty components and sought to validate it in a population of older adults in China.

Prospective epidemiological cohort study.

Community-dwelling residents living in Beijing, China.

1724 community-dwelling adults aged ≥60 years in 2004 with an 8-year follow up.

We developed a simple self-report frailty screening tool—the Frailty Screening Questionnaire (FSQ)—based on the modified Fried frailty components. The predictive ability for outcome was assessed by age and sex adjusted Cox proportional hazards model.

According to FSQ criteria, 7.1% of the participants were frail. Frailty was associated with poor physical function, fractures, falls, and mortality. Both frailty and pre-frailty were associated with a higher mortality rate: frailty—hazards ratio (HR), 3.94, 95% confidence interval (CI), 3.16–4.92, P<0.001; pre-frailty—HR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.57–2.27, P <0.001; adjusted models for this variable did not affect the estimates of the association. Among the four frailty components, slowness was the strongest predictor of mortality. The combination of the four components provided the best risk prediction.

FSQ is a self-report frailty measurement tool that can be rapidly performed to identify older adults with higher risk of adverse health outcomes.