ASSOCIATION OF FRAILTY WITH FIFTEEN-YEAR MORTALITY IN OLDER ADULTS WITHOUT MULTIMORBIDITY

Frailty and multimorbidity are both strongly associated with poor health-related outcomes, including mortality. As multimorbidity is one of the major determinant of frailty, we aimed to explore whether and to what extent frailty without multimorbidity plays an independent role in shortening life. Using data from the Swedish National Study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K), we grouped 1115 subjects free from multimorbidity (affected by less than two chronic diseases). We assessed their frailty-status according to Fried’s frailty phenotype (frail, prefrail, and robust). Vital status was retrieved up to 15 years from the Swedish National Cause of Death Register. We estimated the association between frailty and mortality in 5-year intervals using piecewise proportional hazard regression models. Among the subjects free from multimorbidity, 424 (38%) were pre-frail and 19 (2%) were frail. During 15-year follow-up, 263 (24%) participants died. Within the first 5 years, prefrail and frail subjects had a more than doubled risk of death, compared to robust ones (HR for pre-frailty 2.08; HR for frailty 2.69 - p