Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 8 pp 7218—7231
Prevalence of somatic-mental multimorbidity and its prospective association with disability among older adults in China
- 1 Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
- 2 Beijing Municipal Key Laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
- 3 Department of Neurosurgery, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
- 4 Department of Mathematics and Statistics, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- 5 Global Health and Genomics, School of Medical Sciences and Health, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Received: November 26, 2019 Accepted: March 29, 2020 Published: April 25, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103070How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
We aimed to identify prevalent somatic-mental multimorbidity (SMM) and examine its prospective association with disability among a nationally representative sample. A total of 6728 participants aged 60 years and older in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study were included. A total of 14 somatic or mental conditions were assessed in 2013. SMM was defined as any combination of two or more conditions in which at least one condition was somatic and at least one condition was mental. Disability risk was measured using the combined Activities of Daily Living (ADL)-Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) index (range 0–11; higher index indicates higher disability) in 2013 and 2015. Overall, the prevalence of SMM was 35.7% (95% confidence interval (CI): 34.1%-37.3%) in 2013. After adjustment for sociodemographic characteristics, lifestyles and baseline ADL-IADL index, over a maximum follow-up period of 2 years, SMM was associated with a 2.61 (95% CI: 2.12-3.22)-fold increase in ADL-IADL disability risk compared with that of healthy participants. In conclusion, SMM was prevalent in older Chinese adults, and it was associated with a higher risk of prospective disability.