Tilburg Frailty Indicator

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.