Five Distinct Intrinsic Capacity Aging Patterns Identified in Chinese Older Adults: A Nationwide Study

Background Intrinsic capacity (IC), encompassing locomotive, cognitive, vitality, sensory and psychological domains, is central to defining healthy aging. Establishing norms for IC is crucial for understanding the aging process in Chinese population. Distinct aging patterns could be further captured to guide future studies and clinical practice. Methods In a nationwide cross-sectional community-based study, a total of 6025 elderly participants were recruited from 24 provincial administrative regions in China. IC was assessed over the 5 domains for each participant. Descriptive statistics and generalised additive models were employed to construct norms of IC as function of age, stratified by education or biological sex. A cosine similarity matrix of participants was further computed, upon which graph-based Louvain community detection algorithm (CDA) was applied to capture distinct aging patterns in the population. Results Population norms for the 5 IC domains were established. Data-driven CDA captured 5 distinct aging patterns: 1. Healthy aging (N = 2315), where all IC domains were relatively preserved; 2. Sensory dominant aging (N = 534), where sensory function showed the most profound impairment in aging; 3. Vitality dominant aging (N = 397), where vitality was the single most impaired domain; 4. Locomotion dominant aging (N = 608), in which motor function was persistently below average; and 5. Global accelerated aging (N = 2171), where all the 5 IC domains profoundly declined with age. Conclusions This study provided the norms of IC in aging Chinese population. More importantly, 5 distinct aging patterns were identified, which is of both clinical and scientific interest.