Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: May 29, 2023
Date Accepted: Mar 4, 2024
A latent class analysis of chronic disease patterns and the relationship with health-related quality of life in South Korean older adults: the 2021 Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Multimorbidity is common among older adults and its prevalence increases with age. Chronic conditions are often present as clusters, and the prevalent patterns of clustering should be explored to enhance public health strategies.
Objective:
This study identified multimorbidity patterns and determined the association between latent classes and quality of life in South Korean individuals aged 65 years or older.
Methods:
A sample of 1,806 individuals aged 65 years from the 2021 Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey were analyzed. Latent Class Analysis was performed on nine chronic diseases to determine common chronic disease clusters within individuals and their association with quality of life. The 8-item Health-Related Quality of Life (HINT-8) scale was used to evaluate quality of life.
Results:
Multimorbidity was highly prevalent (54.8%). Three latent classes were identified: Class 1 (relatively healthy group, 41.03%), Class 2 (cardiometabolic conditions, 35.22%), and Class 3 (arthritis, allergy, and asthma, 23.75%). Individuals in Classes 2 and 3 were likely to have poorer health-related Quality of Life than those in Class 1. Individuals in Class 3 had the lowest quality of life.
Conclusions:
Better understanding and classification of multimorbidity are needed to enable public health surveillance and prevention. Additional research is required to understand the causal pathways and further develop and test potential clinical and population interventions targeting multimorbidity. Clinical Trial: None.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.