English translation of the Kihon Checklist

Since the introduction of the long-term care insurance (LTCI) system in 2000, the number of older persons with LTCI service requirement has been increasing in Japan. Therefore, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare started the Care Prevention Programs in 2006 to prevent frailty and disability of older persons, and introduced the “Kihon Checklist” (KCL) to identify vulnerable older adults as those at a higher risk of becoming dependent. The KCL has 25 yes/no questions divided into seven domains: activities of daily living, physical strength, nutrition, oral function, isolation, memory and mood, and has been used for screening frail older adults. Indeed, many studies have shown that the KCL was able to predict older persons who required the LTCI service and to assess frailty. However, several reports used different English translations of the KCL in their manuscripts. Additionally, Sampaio et al. created the Portuguese version of the KCL, and used it to assess frailty in Brazilian older adults, showing that the KCL can be used for elderly care in other countries as well. Therefore, we decided to create the official version of the KCL. The translation of the KCL into English was carried out by two people bilingual in Japanese and English. Next, the English version of KCL was back-translated into Japanese by one of the members of the Working Group on Frailty. This process was used to verify whether or not the KCL back-translation contained any incorrect expressions compared with the original Japanese version of the KCL. We then ensured the similarity of the contents between the original and back-translated versions of the KCL. After we approved the final version of the KCL, we asked a native English speaker to check the English (Table 1). We hope that this English version