Relationship between frailty and long-term care needs in Chinese community-dwelling older adults: a cross-sectional study

Objectives Our study aimed to investigate the relationship between the severity of frailty and the long-term care (LTC) needs of older adults from Chinese communities.Design A cross-sectional study.Setting Three Chinese community health centres. All data were collected by trained researchers through face-to-face collection.Participants We surveyed a total of 540 older residents who aged 60 or older from community in Guangzhou, China.Measures The Chinese version of the Tilburg frailty indicator was used to assess the frailty status of participants. LTC needs was evaluated by Integrated Home Care Services Questionnaire. Using non-adjusted and multivariate adjusted logistic regression analysis to evaluate frailty and LTC needs, then smoothed plots, threshold effect analysis and P for trend were used to further investigate the relationship between them.Results The prevalence of frailty was 45.2% among the 540 older adults enrolled (aged 70.4±8.3 years; 65.7% females). 27% had higher LTC needs, which increased to 65.1% for individuals with frailty. Logistic regression analysis showed that frailty was strongly associated with LTC needs (OR 3.06, 95% CI 2.06 to 4.55, p