To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has reported on the prevalence of frailty and its associated factors among Chinese elderly inpatients using a large, nationally representative sample covering six administrative regions. This study brings new evidence to focus on frailty in the elderly inpatient population in our country. This is a hospital-based large-scale cross-sectional national survey reporting on the prevalence of frailty in China. The FRAIL scale was used in this study. Overall, our study reports that the prevalence estimates of frailty and pre-frailty were 18.0% and 43.0%, respectively, which is similar to previous findings. B. He et al. screened 81,258 participants (14 studies) in a meta-analysis and reported that the pooled prevalence of frailty and pre-frailty was 10% and 43%, respectively, among Chinese community-dwelling adults aged 60 years or older [16]. Lina Ma et al reported that the prevalence of frailty among Chinese hypertensive participants aged 60 years or older was 19.6% in a sample of 1111, using the 68-item frailty index [17]. Binru Han et al reported that among elderly patients undergoing thoracic and abdominal surgery, the prevalence of frailty was 26.12% in a sample of 245, using a frailty phenotype [18]. The prevalence of frailty in the latter two studies was higher than the prevalence in this study, which may be attributed to two aspects. First, since our 9996 subjects came from various departments of the study hospitals, including the internal medicine ward and the surgery ward, the prevalence of frailty (18.02%) is the average result for each department. The reported prevalence of frailty among patients after thoracic and abdominal surgery and among hypertensive patients is higher than 18%, which also indicates that postoperative patients and hypertensive patients may be at high risk of frailty. Second, we should keep in mind that the comparison results may be affected by the use of different screening tools.
The factors associated with frailty included those in the physical dimension, the psychological dimension and the social dimension [19]. There were several meaningful factors found in our study. In general, frailty can be viewed either as a syndrome or as a state. We conducted the survey on the first or second day of hospital admission. Multivariate analysis showed that the following factors were associated with a higher risk of frailty after adjustments were made for the confounding effect of department clustering: older age, female gender, BMI<18.5, ethnic minority, previous alcohol use, emergency and referral admission, falls in the last year, cognitive impairment, vision dysfunction, sleeping dysfunction, urinary dysfunction and defecation dysfunction.
Age has been reported in many studies as a contributing factor to frailty [20, 21], and our research also confirmed that frailty is an age-associated syndrome. In our study, frailty was more prevalent in females, which is consistent with other research findings [22, 23]. The frailty-sex differences have been explained by differences in comorbidity, mood, cognition, and pathophysiological factors [24], and the associated factors of frailty differed by gender. Ethnic minorities tend to have higher rates of frailty than those of Han nationality. The specific difference in favour of frailty susceptibility can be explained by the relatively low level of education or income in patients of ethnic minorities [25]. Our government has made many efforts, and medical and health conditions in ethnic minority areas have been greatly improved. However, a study showed that healthcare access in ethnic minority regions is still worse than in non-minority regions in terms of time to hospital and the value of spatial accessibility in Sichuan Province, southwest of China [26]. Shortages of appropriately skilled healthcare workers are issues that need to improvement in some ethnic minority region [27]. The relationship between alcohol and risk of frailty is often complicated. In our study, frailty was more prevalent in patients with a history of alcohol use. However, Gotaro Kojima et al found that non-drinkers seem more likely than those with low alcohol consumption to develop frailty with a sample of 2544 community-dwelling people [28]. The link between frailty and alcohol may depend on the drinking patterns, the amount of alcohol consumed on each occasion and cumulative alcohol consumption [29].
Nutritional status is also an associated factor for frailty, and the contribution of malnutrition to frailty was identified in this study. We found that patients with low weight (BMI<18.5) were at higher risk for frailty, whereas a high-weight population did not present frailty risk. These results differed from those of previous studies. It has been reported that since overweight may directly cause slowness and poor exercise tolerance, obese individuals are more likely to be frail [30, 31]. The difference may be because the two previous studies were all-female samples. Malnutrition significantly influences the development of frailty, which can be attributed to weight loss leading to weakness, exhaustion, slow walking speed and low physical activity [19].
Patients admission through the emergency department presents greater risk of frailty. It has also been reported that the prevalence of frailty among older emergency department patients is quite high, varying from 43.7% to 45.3% with different screening scales [32]. The condition of patients admitted from the emergency department was critically ill, which may be accompanied by weakness, muscle loss and frailty. These study results remind us that we not only need to pay attention to elderly patients admitted from emergency departments but also need to focus on emergency care. Screening for frailty in older emergency department patients is needed, which can inform prognosis and target discharge planning, including community services required [33].
Falls and frailty share many significant characteristics. Falls in older people are a well-recognized risk factor for frailty [34]. On the other hand, the presence of frailty also confers a particularly poor prognosis of falling, prolonged bed rest and immobilization, which may accelerate the development of frailty [35]. Furthermore, health was no longer merely the absence of disease, which was seen as a state of complete well-being in different domains [36]. Our results showed that poor vision, sleeping dysfunction, urinary dysfunction and defecation dysfunction were all important factors affecting frailty.
This study reveals another phenomenon worthy of attention. We were surprised to find that the prevalence of cognitive impairment is up to 20.57% among elderly inpatients and 26.94% of the frail population. Geriatric cognitive disorders were significantly associated with an increased risk of frailty, which was consistent with other studies [37, 38, 39]. Deirdre A. Robertson et al also concluded that frailty may be a marker for future cognitive impairment [40]. Make a deep understanding of the combination of cognition and physical frailty may have important clinical implications in hospitals. Early interventions in frailty patients may alleviate the progression of cognitive impairment, and vice versa.
Regarding risk factors of frailty for community living versus hospitalized patients, a study of the community-dwelling Turkish elderly population showed that frailty was strongly associated with cognitive impairment, depressive mood, and malnutrition. [41]. Another literature review showed that physical, cognitive, nutritional and social factors, aging and disease are the main contributing factors of frailty [42].
The prevalence and risk factors could be compared across different geographic regions, used as a public health indicator of 'Ageing well', and examined as a heath equity indicator and related to GDP of the city/region and/or accessibility and adequacy of healthcare provisions. Frailty can potentially be prevented or treated with specific modalities, such as exercise, protein-calorie supplementation, vitamin D, and reduction of polypharmacy [43]. Nurses all over the country will become increasingly exposed to frail older patients. Therefore, they should be a better understanding of frailty.
However, there are some potential limitations in this study. First, our study samples were selected from tertiary hospitals and just one hospital in each administration region, which limited the generalizability of this study. Second, the self-reported character of the FRAIL scale may lead to underestimation of frailty by the elderly. Third, the patient population in this study covered many departments, and we did not analyse the impact of diseases and multiple drug use on frailty in this paper. We will continue to explore in depth in the next step of the study.