Health Status Screening in Elderly Patients – Is this the Way Forward?

The rapid ageing of the European population poses a challenge for healthcare systems. The incidence of cancers will rise as the number of adults aged 65 years and older increases. Moreover, the health status of individuals in this age group is diverse, and thus requires modern oncology to apply an individualised approach to treatment. There is a clear need to develop and validate health assessment tools enabling the identification of specific geriatric issues which might be overlooked by standard assessment methods. The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is the ‘gold standard’ for geronto-oncology assessment. However, the complexity of this test has stimulated a search for pre-screening methods able to identify individuals with the potential to gain most from full pre-treatment CGA. Such tools consist of specific tests to evaluate health status in the important functional, psychological, social and cognitive domains. The choice of which tests are best to use within the various screening tools is still a subject of debate. This paper presents a review of the most commonly used tests within various health status domains as well as of the most valuable screening tools.