1. Living Longer But Frailer? Temporal Trends in Life Expectancy and Frailty in Older Swedish Adults.
- Author
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Tazzeo C, Rizzuto D, Calderón-Larrañaga A, Dekhtyar S, Zucchelli A, Xia X, Fratiglioni L, and Vetrano DL
- Subjects
- Humans, Female, Aged, Male, Frail Elderly, Sweden epidemiology, Life Expectancy, Aging, Geriatric Assessment methods, Frailty epidemiology
- Abstract
Background: This study aims to examine temporal trends in frailty state transitions, and years spent frail, in older Swedish adults., Methods: We followed the Swedish National Study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen participants from baseline (2001-2004) for 15 (median: 9.6) years. A 40-deficit frailty index (FI) was constructed to identify 3 frailty states: robust (FI ≤ 0.125), mild frailty (0.125 < FI ≤ 0.25), and moderate and severe frailty (FI > 0.25). Multistate survival analyses were implemented to obtain hazard ratios (HRs) for frailty state transitions, with birth year and sex as predictors. To examine temporal trends, frailty state-specific life expectancies at age 60 were forecasted for robust persons born in different years (1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940), also by sex., Results: At baseline, the 2 941 participants' mean age was 75 years and 65% were women. Predicted life expectancy and time spent frail from age 60 followed an increasing trend by birth year. Hazards of transitioning from mild frailty to death (HR: 0.89; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.83-0.97) and moderate and severe frailty to death (HR: 0.98; 95% CI: 0.97-1.00) were lower for those born later. Women were less likely to transition from robust to mild frailty (HR: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.70-0.93), mild frailty to moderate and severe frailty (HR: 0.80; 95% CI: 0.68-0.93), and moderate and severe frailty to death (HR: 0.68; 95% CI: 0.59-0.78), but spent more time frail., Conclusions: Our results point to an expansion of time spent frail among older Swedish adults over time., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.)
- Published
- 2024
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