title: Associations of frailty with health care costs – results of the ESTHER cohort study
creator: Bock, Jens-Oliver
creator: König, Hans-Helmut
creator: Brenner, Hermann
creator: Haefeli, Walter E.
creator: Quinzler, Renate
creator: Matschinger, Herbert
creator: Saum, Kai-Uwe
creator: Schöttker, Ben
creator: Heider, Dirk
subject: ddc-610
subject: 610 Medical sciences Medicine
description: Background: The concept of frailty is rapidly gaining attention as an independent syndrome with high prevalence in older adults. Thereby, frailty is often related to certain adverse outcomes like mortality or disability. Another adverse outcome discussed is increased health care utilization. However, only few studies examined the impact of frailty on health care utilization and corresponding costs. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate comprehensively the relationship between frailty, health care utilization and costs.   Methods: Cross sectional data from 2598 older participants (57–84 years) recruited in the Saarland, Germany, between 2008 and 2010 was used. Participants passed geriatric assessments that included Fried’s five frailty criteria: weakness, slowness, exhaustion, unintentional weight loss, and physical inactivity. Health care utilization was recorded in the sectors of inpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, pharmaceuticals, and nursing care.   Results: Prevalence of frailty (≥3 symptoms) was 8.0 %. Mean total 3-month costs of frail participants were €3659 (4 or 5 symptoms) and €1616 (3 symptoms) as compared to €642 of nonfrail participants (no symptom). Controlling for comorbidity and general socio-demographic characteristics in multiple regression models, the difference in total costs between frail and non-frail participants still amounted to €1917; p < .05 (4 or 5 symptoms) and €680; p < .05 (3 symptoms). Among the 5 symptoms of frailty, weight loss and exhaustion were significantly associated with total costs after controlling for comorbidity.   Conclusions: The study provides evidence that frailty is associated with increased health care costs. The analyses furthermore indicate that frailty is an important factor for health care costs independent from pure age and comorbidity. Costs were rather attributable to frailty (and comorbidity) than to age. This stresses that the overlapping concepts of multimorbidity and frailty are both necessary to explain health care use and corresponding costs among older adults.
publisher: BioMed Central
date: 2016
type: Article
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/article
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/20548/1/12913_2016_Article_1360.pdf
identifier: DOI:
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-205487
identifier:   Bock, Jens-Oliver ; König, Hans-Helmut ; Brenner, Hermann ; Haefeli, Walter E. ; Quinzler, Renate ; Matschinger, Herbert ; Saum, Kai-Uwe ; Schöttker, Ben ; Heider, Dirk  (2016) Associations of frailty with health care costs – results of the ESTHER cohort study.  BMC Health Services Research, 16 (128).  pp. 1-11.  ISSN 1472-6963     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/20548/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: Please see front page of the work (Sorry, Dublin Core plugin does not recognise license id)
language: eng