Creation and internal assessment of a frailty risk assessment framework for elderly individuals with spinal tuberculosis

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Frailty is prevalent in older adults with spinal tuberculosis, with a reported prevalence of 80.50% in the studied population.
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Key predictors of frailty include age, non-married status, and the number of involved vertebrae, while higher BMI and Barthel Index scores are protective.
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The developed nomogram for identifying Fried frailty demonstrated good model performance with an area under the curve of 0.826.
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Bootstrap internal validation yielded a C-index of 0.826, indicating strong predictive ability for the frailty risk assessment model.
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The study emphasizes the need for external validation and prospective studies before broader clinical application of the frailty assessment tool.

Frontiers In Medicine

by Yu Luo, Yi Wang, Bangyan Guan, Jiarong Tan, Jiahui Zhang, Jiao Luo, Ling Tang, Xin Huang
July 21, 2026

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