Predicting risk of declining functional ability in community-dwelling older people

•The frailty phenotype (FP) retains a sensitivity of ∼10-20% for incident disability.•To improve this sensitivity, a new score was derived starting from FP components.•The score included age, low physical activity, exhaustion and perceived health status.•Overall accuracy was 0.846 and 0.745 in the derivation and validation cohorts.•The derived score improved sensitivity up to 70% preserving specificity.