The European population is aging rapidly. The number of Europeans aged over sixty-five will double in the next fifty years. Active and healthy aging is a societal challenge shared by all European countries, but also an opportunity. The World Health Organization indicated that frailty has become an indicator of lack of successful aging. Therefore, identification of frail elderly is becoming important. However, there are many different screening tools that are currently used to identify frailty. The optimal test should have the capacity to easily identify from the community-dwelling population, those older people at risk of adverse outcomes. During the past years, gait speed has been repeatedly reported as an appealing instrument as a screening tool to detect frailty.

Systematic review of literature on gait speed as predictor of frailty was performed.

A total of 992 articles were retrieved from the literature search and only eleven studies met the inclusion criteria. Frailty is a common geriatric syndrome, characterized by decreased reserve and increased vulnerability to adverse outcomes, including falls, hospitalization, institutionalization and death. Despite frailty is being increasingly recognized in the literature, there is a paucity of direct evidence to guide interventions to reduce frailty. Many single and composite tools to detect the frailty have been proposed but none is consensual, most are time-consuming while evaluating different domains of impairments, and many are not validated. Gait speed seems to be a single, reliable, valid, sensitive, cheap, quick and simple tool that identifies frailty people. However, the way to perform the test parameters vary widely, influencing interpretations of physical performance.

The evidence recommends to detect frailty in people in order to achieve an active and healthy ageing. Gait speed could be a suitable predictor to identify frailty although this systematic review found many differences between the gait speed protocols used in clinical practice. It is necessary to establish a standard protocol of gait speed agreed by experts in the area on frailty to be implemented with success in clinical practice.