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	Groningen Frailty Indicator	Tilburg Frailty Indicator
Field	Social Gerontology	Social Gerontology
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	2004	2010
Originator	Nardi Steverink, Joris P. J. Slaets, Hanneke Schuurmans (University of Groningen)	Robbert J. J. Gobbens and colleagues (Tilburg University)
Type	Self-report multidomain frailty screening questionnaire	Self-report multidimensional frailty screening questionnaire
Seminal source	Schuurmans, H., Steverink, N., Lindenberg, S., Frieswijk, N., & Slaets, J. P. J. (2004). Old or Frail: What Tells Us More? The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 59(9), M962-M965.	Gobbens, R. J. J., van Assen, M. A. L. M., Luijkx, K. G., Wijnen-Sponselee, M. T., & Schols, J. M. G. A. (2010). The Tilburg Frailty Indicator: Psychometric Properties. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 11(5), 344-355.
Aliases	GFI, Groningen Frailty Index, GFI frailty screen	TFI, Tilburg Frailty Index, Integral Frailty Self-Report, Multidimensional Frailty Questionnaire
Related	3	3
Summary	The Groningen Frailty Indicator (GFI) is a brief 15-item self-report screening instrument that measures frailty across four domains: physical, cognitive, social, and psychological. Developed at the University of Groningen by Nardi Steverink, Joris Slaets, and colleagues around the turn of the millennium and characterized in Schuurmans and colleagues' 2004 study 'Old or Frail: What Tells Us More?', the GFI was designed to identify older people whose vulnerability is better captured by accumulated functional losses than by chronological age alone. Each domain contributes items scored so that the presence of a problem adds a point, producing a total of 0–15, with a score of 4 or higher commonly taken to indicate frailty. The GFI is widely used in Dutch and European primary care and oncology to flag older patients for fuller geriatric evaluation.	The Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI) is a self-report questionnaire that measures frailty in older adults across three domains — physical, psychological, and social. Developed by Robbert Gobbens and colleagues at Tilburg University and published in 2010, it operationalizes an explicit 'integral conceptual model of frailty' in which frailty is a dynamic state arising from losses in one or more functioning domains, itself driven by life-course determinants such as age, sex, multimorbidity, and life events. Part A of the instrument records these determinants; Part B comprises 15 items that sum to a 0–15 frailty score, with a cut point of 5 commonly used to flag frailty. Unlike purely physical phenotypes, the TFI deliberately incorporates psychological (mood, anxiety, coping, cognition) and social (living alone, social relationships, support) components, reflecting the social-gerontological view that frailty is more than a biomedical syndrome.