ACHA publication: Disease trajectories and medical expenditures of older adults with disabilities: insights from China’s long-term care insurance program

This paper, led from the National Clinical Research Center for Geriatrics in Chengdu, China, with input from the Academic Centre for Healthy Ageing.  The study used a large database of routine data from 30000 older Chinese people collected as part of the Chinese Long Term Insurance programme to understand how pre-existing conditions and subsequent health events affected the risk of death.

It showed that non-communicable diseases played an important role in mortality risk, as in European populations, but that malnutrition and infection were the main causes of death.  These findings are important as the Chinese population ages rapidly and as researchers work with care teams to work out how to optimise care in a long-term care sector which is, by necessity, being rapidly built.  The research team will use these findings to focus on nutrition in long-term care settings and to consider how this impacts on adverse outcomes including death.

This work represents part of establishing international collaborations around ACHA, and is a follow-up to our exchange visit to Chengdu, China in November 2024.

You can read the paper in full here.