SARC-F Sarcopenia Screening Calculator

What SARC-F actually measures

Lifting a bag of groceries. Walking across the kitchen. Standing up from the couch without pushing off the armrest. None of that sounds like a medical test, and that's deliberate — Theodore Malmstrom and John Morley built SARC-F in 2013 because the formal ways to measure sarcopenia (grip strength dynamometers, DXA scans, timed gait tests) aren't things most primary care visits have the time or equipment for.

SARC-F asks about five everyday tasks: carrying 10 pounds, walking across a room, getting out of a chair or bed, climbing a flight of stairs, and how many times you've fallen in the past year. Each one maps to a way muscle loss tends to show up in daily life before it shows up on a scan.

It isn't trying to catch every case. The people who designed it chose to make it more specific than sensitive — a positive score is a strong signal worth acting on, but a negative one doesn't fully close the door on early muscle loss, the kind that hasn't yet limited daily tasks.

How the scoring works

Five questions, three answer choices each: none (0 points), some difficulty (1 point), a lot of difficulty or unable (2 points). The falls question works slightly differently — it asks how many times you've fallen in the past year, scored none (0), one to three falls (1), four or more falls (2).

Add the five numbers and you land somewhere between 0 and 10. There's no partial credit for "it depends on the day" — pick the answer that's been true more often than not recently.

A total of 4 or higher is the cutoff the developers settled on for a positive screen. Below that, SARC-F isn't telling you there's no muscle loss — only that, by this questionnaire's measure, it probably isn't yet limiting how you move through your day.

What a positive screen means — and what it doesn't

A score of 4 or more puts you in the group the EWGSOP2 consensus (the European working group that standardizes how clinicians define and diagnose sarcopenia) flags for the next step: an actual strength test, usually grip strength, sometimes paired with a DXA or bioimpedance read on muscle mass. SARC-F is the "Find" step in their four-step Find-Assess-Confirm-Severity pathway — not the diagnosis itself.

Think of it the way a smoke detector relates to a fire inspection. The detector going off doesn't tell you where the fire is or how bad it is; it tells you to go look. A SARC-F score of 6, say, after a year of fewer walks and a couple of near-falls on the stairs, is worth bringing to a doctor's appointment — not because the number is a verdict, but because it's a dated, concrete account of what's changed.