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	Vulnerable Elders Survey-13	Tilburg Frailty Indicator
Field	Social Gerontology	Social Gerontology
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	2001	2010
Originator	Debra Saliba, Neil S. Wenger and colleagues (RAND / ACOVE project)	Robbert J. J. Gobbens and colleagues (Tilburg University)
Type	Function-based vulnerability screening scale	Self-report multidimensional frailty screening questionnaire
Seminal source	Saliba, D., Elliott, M., Rubenstein, L. Z., Solomon, D. H., Young, R. T., Kamberg, C. J., Roth, C., MacLean, C. H., Shekelle, P. G., Sloss, E. M., & Wenger, N. S. (2001). The Vulnerable Elders Survey: A Tool for Identifying Vulnerable Older People in the Community. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 49(12), 1691-1699.	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	VES-13, Vulnerable Elders Survey, VES-13 screening tool	TFI, Tilburg Frailty Index, Integral Frailty Self-Report, Multidimensional Frailty Questionnaire
Related	3	3
Summary	The Vulnerable Elders Survey-13 (VES-13) is a brief, function-based screening tool that identifies community-dwelling older adults at increased risk of health deterioration, functional decline, and death. Developed by Debra Saliba, Neil Wenger, and colleagues at RAND as part of the Assessing Care of Vulnerable Elders (ACOVE) project and published in 2001, the VES-13 scores 13 items spanning age, self-rated health, six physical-function tasks, and five activities of daily living. Points are weighted and summed to a maximum of 10, and a total of 3 or more classifies a person as 'vulnerable' — a status associated in the validation cohort with a roughly fourfold greater risk of functional decline or death over two years. It takes under five minutes, can be self-completed by phone or mail, and requires no clinician, which has made it a workhorse triage instrument in geriatrics and geriatric oncology.	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.