Frailty Among Older Indians: State-Level Factors

Abstract

Frailty is a common syndrome affecting older adults. While frailty has well-established relationships with multiple adverse health outcomes and death, the role of the social and economic environment in the development of frailty is less clear. We consider this relationship in India, which has a growing population of older adults whose environments have undergone extensive social and economic changes over the last few decades. We compare the distributions of frailty among older adults across the states of India and explore the influence of both current social and economic indicators and historical indicators at the state level. We find substantial variation in the state-level prevalence of frailty, which remains even after sex stratification and age standardization. We also find significant associations between frailty and current (2018) and historic (1981) state-level socioeconomic variables. We conclude with a discussion of the scientific and policy implications of early-life and contemporaneous social and economic conditions for the frailty of older adults.

A Holistic Approach to Cognitive Frailty in Community-dwelling Older Adults in India: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey

“…As the strongest effect in the study, this suggests that policies that increase the proportion of people with secondary education or higher in India could gradually have a very significant impact on the health of people in older age. From the data in the LASI dataset, it can be seen that more than 60.0% of over 60s have less than primary education [70, 71]. World bank data (2011) [72] indicates that only 40% of Indian adolescents attend secondary school, but 95% of younger children are now attending primary school.…”