Association between comprehensive health literacy and frailty level in community-dwelling older adults: A cross-sectional study in Japan

Aim: The present study explored the association between comprehensive health literacy and frailty level in community-dwelling older adults in Japan. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study. We enrolled 517 community-dwelling older adults (mean age 73.2 +/- 6.3 years; 410 women). We divided the cohort into two groups, non-frail and any-frail, based on Fried Frailty Index scores. We assessed comprehensive health literacy using a 14-item health literacy scale, and classified the participants as having high or low health literacy. We carried out multivariate logistic regression analysis in which the dependent variable was the presence of non-frailty and the independent variable was the presence of high health literacy. The analysis was adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, educational history and cognitive function. Results: There were 132 (25.5%) and 385 (74.5%) participants in the non-frail and any-frail groups, respectively. The analysis showed that high health literacy was independently associated with the non-frail group (odds ratio 1.64, 95% confidence interval 1.03-2.61). Conclusions: The results showed that high health literacy was associated with non-frailty. This result implies that comprehensive health literacy might play a salient role in maintaining good health status in community-dwelling older adults in Japan.