Three in Four Older Australians Now Live With Multiple Chronic Conditions

And They Cluster in Predictable Patterns, New Study Finds

If you’re managing more than one health condition at once, you’re in the majority, not the minority. A major new nationwide study from the University of Sydney has found that more than three-quarters of Australians aged 65 and over are living with multiple chronic conditions – and, importantly, that these conditions don’t occur randomly. Instead, they tend to cluster into three consistent patterns, a finding researchers say should reshape how healthcare is planned for an ageing population.

What the study found

Published in the Medical Journal of Australia, the study analysed the health records of more than 4.4 million Australians aged 65 and over, making it the first up-to-date national study of its kind to show how these patterns of multimorbidity differ by age and socioeconomic status.

“Most older Australians have multiple chronic conditions – it’s the norm, not the exception,” said Associate Professor Edwin Tan, from the University of Sydney’s School of Pharmacy and Charles Perkins Centre.

The study found 76 per cent of older Australians had multimorbidity (defined as two or more chronic conditions), and about a third had five or more. High blood pressure, high cholesterol and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GORD) were the most common individual conditions recorded.

The three clusters

Rather than conditions simply piling up at random, researchers identified three consistent groupings that held true across both men and women, though the prevalence of specific conditions varied between the sexes:

• Cardiovascular-metabolic — including hypertension, heart failure and diabetes
• Neuropsychiatric-functional decline — including depression, chronic pain and anxiety
• Inflammatory-musculoskeletal-cancer — including chronic airway disease, osteoporosis and cancer

A/Prof Tan said the clustering likely reflects shared risk factors and underlying disease mechanisms between conditions in the same group. “This may reflect shared risk factors and underlying disease mechanisms, and highlights the need for more integrated, person-centred models of care rather than treating conditions in isolation,” he said.

Age and inequality both play a major role

The study found the burden of multimorbidity increases sharply with age, particularly for those over 85, and was notably higher in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities – a disparity A/Prof Tan described as exposing “major health inequalities.”

That pattern lines up with broader national data. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s most recent analysis found multimorbidity across the population is significantly more common in areas of greatest socioeconomic disadvantage (43 per cent) compared with areas of least disadvantage (32 per cent), and higher again in inner and outer regional areas compared with major cities. The AIHW data also shows people living with multimorbidity tend to need more frequent and longer medical appointments, and manage more medications, than those without it — underscoring why the University of Sydney researchers are calling for more coordinated care rather than treating each condition separately.

Why this matters for how healthcare is delivered

A/Prof Tan said understanding exactly how conditions cluster is critical for planning services for an ageing population, given multimorbidity is linked to poorer quality of life, greater functional decline, higher mortality, and increased healthcare use and hospitalisation.

“These findings highlight an urgent need for better prevention and more coordinated care to support ageing populations with complex health needs,” he said.

For many readers, this research will simply put data behind lived experience – the reality of juggling multiple specialists, medications and appointments rather than a single, tidy diagnosis. The researchers hope identifying these patterns will help push the health system toward more integrated care models that treat the whole person, rather than one condition at a time.

This article is general in nature and reports on published research findings. It isn’t personalised health advice — if you have concerns about managing multiple health conditions, speak with your GP.