SARC-F Sarcopenia Screen
SARC-F is a brief, five-item self-report questionnaire for case-finding of sarcopenia — the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and function — in older adults. Introduced by Theodore Malmstrom and John Morley in 2013, its name is an acronym for the five domains it assesses: Strength, Assistance in walking, Rising from a chair, Climbing stairs, and Falls. Each item is scored 0 to 2, giving a total from 0 to 10, and a score of 4 or higher signals likely sarcopenia and risk of poor functional outcomes. Because it requires no equipment, no clinician, and under a minute to complete, SARC-F is recommended by major consensus groups (including the European and Asian sarcopenia working groups) as the first step in sarcopenia case-finding, to be confirmed by muscle-strength and mass measurement.
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Sources
- Malmstrom, T. K., & Morley, J. E. (2013). SARC-F: A Simple Questionnaire to Rapidly Diagnose Sarcopenia. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 14(8), 531-532. DOI: 10.1016/j.jamda.2013.05.018 ↗
- Malmstrom, T. K., Miller, D. K., Simonsick, E. M., Ferrucci, L., & Morley, J. E. (2016). SARC-F: a symptom score to predict persons with sarcopenia at risk for poor functional outcomes. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, 7(1), 28-36. DOI: 10.1002/jcsm.12048 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). SARC-F: Five-Item Self-Report Questionnaire for Sarcopenia Case-Finding. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/social-gerontology/sarc-f-sarcopenia-screening
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