Objective  To examine the status of frailty and to explore impacts of parent-child relationship on frailty among oldest-old people.

  Methods  We recruited 3 448 oldest-old residents aged ≥ 75 years with stratified random cluster sampling from communities covered by 10 community health care centers in Tangshan city of Hebei province and then conducted a household survey among the participants between July 2016 and January 2017 with a self-designed general questionnaire and Comprehensive Frailty Assessment Instrument (CFAI).

  Results  Among all the participants, the prevalence rate of frailty was 100 %, with 1 093 (31.70%), 1 230 (35.67 %), and 1 125 (32.63 %) participants having mild, moderate, and severe frailty, respectively. Multivariate regression analyses revealed that among the participants, significant risk factors of frailty included female gender (odds ratio OR=1.220, 95% confidence interval 95 % CI: 1.020 – 1.461), aged 80 years and older (OR = 2.030, 95 % CI: 1.596 – 2.581), with children living in a same city as the parents' home town (OR = 2.376, 95 % CI: 1.257 – 4.490), having inharmonious relationship with children (OR = 6.314, 95 % CI: 4.561 – 8.741), without alternate visits of children (OR = 1.309, 95 % CI: 1.078 – 1.589), not communicating with children frequently (OR = 1.869, 95% CI: 1.103 – 3.168), and having no frequent telephone calls with children (OR = 1.366, 95 % CI: 1.106 – 1.686) (all P < 0.05); whereas, the protective factors against frailty were the education of senior high school and above (OR = 0.607, 95 % CI: 0.375 – 0.980) and frequent acceptance of participants' advise by their children (OR = 0.506, 95 % CI: 0.374 – 0.685) (both P < 0.05).

  Conclusion  Poor parent-child relationship could aggravate frailty condition of middle-old and oldest-old persons and communication between oldest-old people and their children should be promoted for the implementation of healthy aging.