Objectives: Frailty is a state of decreased resilience when a person is exposed to an apparently innocuous stressor that is associated with numerous adverse outcomes. The aim is to examine frailty prevalence in China by demographic and investigate the correlation between frailty and outcome.
Design: Cohort study.
Setting: Community-dwelling adults from 28 Chinese provinces.
Methods: The participants were 2,273 adults aged ≥65 years from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. Frailty was scored on the FRAIL scale. We estimated frailty prevalence in the overall sample. The association of frailty with adverse outcomes was evaluated by multinomial logistic regression analysis.
Results: We found that 17.0% of adults aged ≥65 years were frail. Frail individuals had a higher prevalence of comorbidities, falls, and need for medical care than non-frail individuals. The multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrated that frail status (OR = 2.061, 95% CI: 1.422-2.985) and pre-frail status (OR = 1.540, 95% CI: 1.135-2.089) were associated with falls in the previous two years. Serious falls in the previous two years were related to pre-frailty (OR = 1.815, 95% CI: 1.153-2.859) and frailty (OR = 2.797, 95% CI: 1.655-4.727). In addition, frail individuals were found to be at higher risk for outpatient visits over the previous month (OR = 2.091, 95% CI: 1.502-2.911) and readmission over the previous year (OR = 2.033, 95% CI: 1.480-2.792) in the analysis.
Conclusions: Pre-frailty and frailty were positively associated with major adverse outcomes, including falls and serious falls; they were also associated with more frequent outpatient visits and readmissions in the past.
Keywords: China; Frailty; adverse outcomes; aging.