Short Physical Performance Battery and all-cause mortality: systematic review and meta-analysis

The Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) is a well-established tool to assess lower extremity physical performance status. Its predictive ability for all-cause mortality has been sparsely reported, but with conflicting results in different subsets of participants. The aim of this study was to perform a meta-analysis investigating the relationship between SPPB score and all-cause mortality.

Articles were searched in MEDLINE, the Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, and BioMed Central between July and September 2015 and updated in January 2016. Inclusion criteria were observational studies; >50 participants; stratification of population according to SPPB value; data on all-cause mortality; English language publications. Twenty-four articles were selected from available evidence. Data of interest (i.e., clinical characteristics, information after stratification of the sample into four SPPB groups [0-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12]) were retrieved from the articles and/or obtained by the study authors. The odds ratio (OR) and/or hazard ratio (HR) was obtained for all-cause mortality according to SPPB category (with SPPB scores 10-12 considered as reference) with adjustment for age, sex, and body mass index.