Increased healthcare costs associated with frailty among community-dwelling older people: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Although frailty of older people has been shown to be associated with numerous adverse health outcomes, evidence on healthcare costs associated with frailty is scarce. Methods: Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, and AMED were electronically searched in January 2019 based on a protocol in accordance with the PRISMA statement using Medical Subjective Heading and free text terms, with explosion functions. Language restriction was not applied. Studies were considered if they were published between 2000 to January 2019 and provided healthcare costs stratified by the frailty status categories among community-dwelling older people with a mean age of 60 years or higher. Reference lists of the included studies were reviewed for additional studies. Healthcare costs according to frailty status were compared using standardized mean difference random-effects meta-analysis. Results: The systematic review found 3116 citations. After screening for fide, abstract, and full-text for eligibility, 5 studies involving 3742362 participants were included. Healthcare costs were compared across three frailty status, robust, prefrailty, and frailty. Both prefrailty (5 studies, Hedges' g = 0.24, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.15-0.33, p < 0.001) and frailty (5 studies, Hedges' g = 0.62, 95%CI = 0.61-0.62, p < 0.001) were associated with significantly higher healthcare costs when compared with robustness. There was a high degree of heterogeneity. The risk of publication bias was considered to be low in funnel plots. Conclusions: This systematic review and meta-analysis found a dose-response increase in the healthcare costs associated with frailty among community-dwelling older adults. Future research should recognize frailty as an important factor associated with increased healthcare costs.