Hopelessness, life dissatisfaction and boredom among older people

Identifying frail older people, and in particular, people who are psychologically frail in a community setting is difficult. This article investigates predictors of psychological frailty and constructs a short and effective pre-detection tool for highly psychologically frail older people. The Belgian Ageing Studies, a cross-sectional study (n=28.245) was used. Measures included four items of the Geriatric Depression Scale, the psychological domain of the Comprehensive Frailty Assessment Instrument. First bivariate analyses were used. Afterwards, Chi-squared automatic interaction detector (CHAID) analysis was applied to gain an insight into the hierarchical order of predictors for high psychological frailty. Findings indicate that the combination of hopelessness and life dissatisfaction predicts high psychological frailty in 68.4% of cases. Early detection of frailty offers opportunities to start early interventions, and can delay or reduce frailty. In order to detect older people who are psychologically frail, a simple two question pre-detection tool was developed. To conclude: if a patient answers 'yes' to feeling hopeless and 'no' to having life satisfaction, this predicts with great probability (68.4%) high psychological frailty.