Comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA)—a key tool for geriatric medicine—is commonly used to assess older people’s health status and frailty. However, performing CGA in outpatient clinics is difficult because the assessment of cognition, activities of daily living (ADLs), depression, quality of life (QoL), nutrition, medications and social conditions is time consuming and requires the cooperation of medical staff. Frailty—an aspect of geriatric medicine that indicates the weakness of the body—is a critical measure of older adults’ physical function.

The Dementia Assessment Sheet for Community-based Integrated Care System 8-items (DASC-8) is a validated and simple rating scale, developed for the classification of setting glycemic targets based on cognition and ADL for older adults with diabetes mellitus. As cognitive function and ADL are key elements of frailty in a broad sense and in CGA, we examined whether the DASC-8 category is useful for the screening of frailty and CGA components.