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. 2022 Jun 20;19(12):7528.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph19127528.

Association between Age-Friendliness of Communities and Frailty among Older Adults: A Multilevel Analysis

Jixiang Xu  1 , Yingwei Chen  1 , Yujie Wang  1 , Junling Gao  1   2   3 , Limei Huang  4
Affiliations

Association between Age-Friendliness of Communities and Frailty among Older Adults: A Multilevel Analysis

Jixiang Xu et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

An age-friendly environment is one of the measures of healthy aging. However, there is scarce evidence of the relationship between the age-friendliness of communities (AFC) and frailty status among Chinese older adults. This study aims to examine this relationship using a multilevel analysis with the data of a cross-sectional study conducted among 10,958 older adults living in 43 communities in four cities in China. The validated Age-friendly Community Evaluation Scale and Chinese frailty screening-10 Scale (CFS-10) were used to measure AFC and Frailty. Multilevel regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between the AFC in two assessments of individual- and community-level and frailty status. After controlling for individual-level socio-demographic, health status, and lifestyle variables, compared with older adults in the lowest quartile of the individual-level perception of AFC, the frailty odds ratios for those in the top three quartiles were 0.69 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.56-0.83), 0.75 (95% CI: 0.61-0.91), and 0.56 (95% CI: 0.48-0.74). However, there was no association between the community-level AFC and frailty. A higher level of age-friendliness in the community is associated with lower frailty odds. Therefore, building age-friendly communities may be an important measure to prevent frailty among Chinese older adults.

Keywords: age-friendly community; frailty; multilevel analysis; older adults.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

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