ArticleHealthcare (Basel, Switzerland)2026
Age-Friendly Environments for Healthy Ageing in Place: Refinement of a Multidimensional Index and Regional Disparities in South Korea.
Article in Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND/
objectivesSouth Korea faces one of the world's most rapid demographic transitions. As population ageing accelerates, creating environments that support healthy ageing-in-place has become a critical public health priority. Grounded in environmental gerontology and the WHO Age-Friendly Cities framework, Ko and colleagues developed the Age-Friendly City Index to assess physical, social, and service environments influencing older adults' health and well-being; however, the index had only undergone face validity testing. This study empirically evaluated and refined the Index at the district level and examined regional disparities in age-friendliness across South Korean municipalities.
methodsData from 89 randomly selected municipal (si-gun-gu) districts across 7 metropolitan and 8 provincial cities were drawn from 2020 national public administrative sources. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using Mplus 7.0. The retained indicators were standardized and aggregated into dimension and total scores. Exploratory comparisons between metropolitan and non-metropolitan municipalities were conducted using Welch's
resultsThe refined Index retained ten indicators across the three dimensions, including four for the physical environment, three for the social environment, and three for the service environment. The physical environment showed the strongest empirical coherence, whereas the social and service environments were weakly defined. Non-metropolitan municipalities had higher observed scores across all three dimensions and in the total score. Effect sizes ranged from moderate to large, with the largest difference observed in the physical environment.
conclusionsThe refined Index offers a preliminary diagnostic framework for benchmarking age-friendliness, with the physical environment score providing the most dependable basis for comparison. Findings reveal pronounced regional disparities in per-older-resident environmental provision and underscore the need for region-specific public health and urban planning strategies to foster inclusive, supportive, and health-promoting communities for older adults.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.