Prevalence of frailty in China: Protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: China is facing more and more enormous challenges including aging, the increase of social security costs and health care cost, decrease of labors, and how to keep elders’ capacity to function well and live independently. Healthy aging has become an extremely challenging issue. Frailty, a geriatric syndrome resulted from the declines of multiple physiological systems, characterized by malnutrition, exercise intolerance, dependence, longer bed rest, lower gaits peed, weakness, weight loss, anorexia, hip fracture, risk of falling, delirium, dementia, and keep indoors, has become one of the biggest challenges in facilitating healthy aging. Because the research of frailty just had started in recent years in China, the evidence regarding the prevalence of frailty among the Chinese population is scarce and just limited in certain area. METHOD: We will systematically search 7 electronic database including PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Web of science, MEDLINE, CNKI (Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure), and CBM (Chinese Biological Medical Database) to identify studies that provide or potential available of data regarding to prevalence of frailty. Risk of bias of individual study will be assessed using 8-iterm critical appraisal criteria for prevalence or incidence studies. Data will be analyzed using STATA V.12.0 software. CONCLUSIONS: Our systematic review and meta-analysis will firstly pool the results from available studies to provide a comprehensive evidence for the prevalence of frailty. The results of this study will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication.