K. Nakanishi1, M. Mori1, E. Kanitani2, K. Murosawa2, T. Miura1
1Kanazawa Medical University Himi Municipal Hospital, Department of Rehabilitation, Himi, Japan, 2Community Comprehensive Care Center of Himi City, Elderly Care Division, Himi, Japan
Background: Preventive Long-term Care Projects have recently grown rapidly in Japan, where the rate of aging is 28.4%. Our community practices the preventive care exercise program regularly. Although it has been reported that this program improved physical and mental functions, quality of life, and social participation in the elderly community, there are a few reports of relevance among the effect of those exercises and age or sex.
Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine how the effect of preventive care exercise program differ depending on age or sex in the elderly live in community.
Methods: The participants were 86 males and 406 females aged 65 or older (mean age: 78.6±6.0) that finished the 3-month preventive care exercise program. The program consisted of six mild gymnastics and four resistance training (upper limb elevation, hip-abduction, squat, and straight leg raising). The participants exercise for 35 minutes at a rate of 2 days/week. We evaluated 4 performance tests (grip strength, single-leg standing time, timed up & go test: TUG, and 5-meter walking time: 5MWT). The participants were divided to three groups by ages (Group-A: 65-74, Group-B: 75-80, Group-C: 81-94 years old), and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to comparison of before and after the program for each group. Also, we equalized sample size of three groups by random sampling, and examine how the effect of program differ depending on age or sex using by a two ways factorial analysis of variance with replicate determination. Bonferroni's multiple comparison test was selected as a post hoc comparisons. BellCurve for Excel was used for all statistical analysis and the levels of significance were set at less than 5% as a significant difference, and less than 10% as a significant trend.
Results: For women, there were significant improvements of single-leg standing time and TUG in all groups (P<0.01), while 5MWT improved significantly only in Groups B and C (P<0.05). For men, there was significant improvement of 5MWT in all groups (P<0.05), while the single-leg standing time improved only in Group-A and TUG in Groups B and C (P<0.05). Furthermore, degrees of improvement in 5MWT of men (4.21 to 3.68 s) was larger than that of women (3.97 to 3.85 s) in Group-B (P<0.05) (n=24). Improvement in TUG tended to be larger in men (8.52 to 7.53 s) than in women (8.13 to 7.77 s) for Group-B. There was an interaction between age and sex (P=0.051).
Conclusion(s): It is suggested that the effects of the 3-month preventive care exercise program on gait speed or agility differ depending on age or sex; an interaction between these factors exists. However, we need to increase the male participants in future studies since the sample size was small.
Implications: Our findings show that improvement of motor functions in a short amount of time supports the expansion of Preventive Long-term Care Projects for countries and regions suffering from aging. This could lead to the development of more effective programs in the future based on the effects of the program differing depending on age or sex.
Funding, acknowledgements: This work was funded by the local public entity and government in Japan.
Keywords: Preventive Long-Term Care, An aging society, Gait speed
Topic: Health promotion & wellbeing/healthy ageing/physical activity
Did this work require ethics approval? No
Institution: N/A
Committee: N/A
Reason: This work was public project approved by the government in japan and conforms to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki.
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
