The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is a powerful tool for analyzing the Medicare population. Based upon a stratified random sample, we can derive information about the health care use, expenditure, and financing of Medicare's 36 million enrollees. We can also learn about those enrollees' health status, living arrangements, and access to and satisfaction with care. In the charts that...

OBJECTIVE to determine contributors to decline in functional capacity in elderly patients with known vascular risk factors or disease. DESIGN secondary analysis of longitudinal data gathered over an average 3.2 years of follow-up. PARTICIPANTS 5,804 community-dwelling subjects aged 70-82 years with a history of, or risk factors for, ischaemic vascular disease. MEASUREMENTS basic activitie...

The physical housing environment is important to facilitate activities of daily living (ADL) for older people. A hindering environment may lead to ADL dependence and thus increase the need for home services, which is individually restricting and a growing societal burden. This study presents simulations of policy changes with regard to housing accessibility that estimates the potential impact s...

BACKGROUND Although many studies have suggested social participation (SP) has beneficial effects on elderly people's health, most of them failed to deal with paid work. Additionally, few studies have focused on the age effect between SP and older people's health. To investigate whether the association between SP, including paid work, and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), exhibits ...

PURPOSE To determine the needs, barriers and facilitators of function in individuals with stroke after discharge from hospital. To examine the results stratified by the patient's acute score (<41, 41-80, >80) on the functional independence measure (FIM). METHOD This was a cohort study of 209 patients who had been admitted to hospital because of stroke. Patients were interviewed following hosp...

OBJECTIVE Our hypothesis was that including cognitive status and syndromal depression in specifying functional impairment would result in significant differences in estimates of active life expectancy from specifications that included only standard functional measures (such as activities of daily living). METHOD The subjects were the 3481 continuing participants of the Baltimore Epidemiologic...

BACKGROUND Population-based data examining the relationship between social participation (SP) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) are scarce. This study examined the cross-sectional relationship between SP and IADL in community-dwelling elderly persons. METHODS Self-administered questionnaires were mailed to 23 710 residents aged ≥65 years in Nara, Japan (response rate: 74.2%)....

BACKGROUND Social isolation is associated with poorer health, and is seen by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as one of the major issues facing the industrialised world. AIM To explore the significance of social isolation in the older population for GPs and for service commissioners. DESIGN OF STUDY Secondary analysis of baseline data from a randomised controlled trial of health risk app...

BACKGROUND The rapid increase in life expectancy in Chile, with obesity as the main nutritional problem in all age groups, makes it necessary to ask whether the years gained are healthy. AIM To study the trajectories of disability associated with obesity in Chilean elderly groups from different socio-economic and demographic backgrounds. MATERIAL AND METHODS Longitudinal study of 3 cohorts ...

BACKGROUND Concerns about using Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) in national surveys come up frequently in geriatric and rehabilitation medicine due to high rates of non-performance for reasons other than health. We aim to evaluate the effect of different strategies of classifying "does not do" responses to IADL questions when estimating prevalence of IADL limitations in a nation...