Abstract

PIMENTA, Gabriel Minete et al. Lifestyle and functional fitness of elderly men and women attending a community center. Motri. [online]. 2022, vol.18, n.3, pp.396-403.  Epub Sep 30, 2022. ISSN 1646-107X.  https://doi.org/10.6063/motricidade.26569.

Identifying indicators that contribute to a favourable living condition becomes of great value for the diagnosis, as well as implementing preventive and health-promoting actions. The present work objective was to evaluate and compare the lifestyle, depressive symptoms and functional aptitude of elderly men and women attending a community centre. The sample consisted of 277 elderly people, 197 (71%) women and 80 (29%) men aged above 60 years. The elderly were evaluated using a questionnaire to assess lifestyle and depressive symptoms, and their functional fitness was assessed by functional autonomy tests. The differences between the parameters were analysed by the student’s t-test and χ2 whenever appropriate. Depressive symptoms were present in 35% of the elderly; however, the lifestyle analysis showed that 57.40% of the elderly had a very good classification, followed by 24.55% as good, 17.33% as excellent and 0.72% as regular. Regarding functional fitness, 19.39% of the elderly had a score related to a very good level, 15.97% good, 16.35% fair and 45.29% weak. The results found in this study suggest that the elderly attending the community centre presented low depressive symptoms with a lifestyle classification considered very good, however, with poor functional fitness with differences in some parameters between men and women.

Keywords : elderly; functional aptitude; lifestyle; aging.

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