Lawton and Brody's eight-item Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale is used often with elderly patients but scored in several different ways. We scored the IADL with seven popular procedures ranging from relatively simple to complex (Guttman scores, summed and Rasch scores from dichotomous, trichotomous, and polytomous items) in a sample of rural elders (N = 231). We compared the...

This paper introduces Lynx, an intelligent system for personal safety at home environments, oriented to elderly people living independently, which encompasses a decision support machine for automatic home risk prevention, tested in real-life environments to respond to real time situations. The automatic system described in this paper prevents such risks by an advanced analytic methods supported...

OBJECTIVE Depression affects nearly one in five Americans at some time in their life, causing individual suffering and financial cost. The Internet has made it possible to deliver telemedicine care economically to areas and populations with limited access to specialist or culturally and linguistically congruent care. METHODS This study compared the effectiveness for Hispanic patients of depre...

INTRODUCTION The objective of this study was to identify physical and mental outcomes of osteoporosis that affect quality of life in women. METHODS Data were from the Alameda County Study, a longitudinal study of health and mortality that since 1965 has followed a cohort of 6,928 American persons aged 16 to 94 years at baseline. Subjects for this analysis were women who survived until at leas...

Persons with stroke are commonly provided rehabilitation by occupational therapists. Occupational therapy endeavors to restore the person's independence in activities of daily living, skills in functional performance, infuse evidence-based practice to assure that interventions are efficacious and cost effective. This article reviews the literature and describes a variety of evidence-based inter...

The incidence of cardiovascular disease in humans is more than three times that of many wild and domestic mammals despite nearly identical heart morphologies and responses to exercise. A survey of mammalian species from 0.002-kg shrews to 43,000-kg whales shows that the human heart is more dog-like than cat-like and that neither body size nor longevity accounts for the relative vulnerability to...

conclusions based on the path analysis model, working condition and socioeconomic status directly and indirectly influence birth weight. thus, as well as attention to treatment and health care (biological aspect), special attention must also be paid to mothers’ socioeconomic factors. results the final path model fitted well (cfi =1, rmsea=0.00) and showed that among direct paths, working condit...

OBJECTIVES This report presents health statistics from the 2001 National Health Interview Survey for the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States, classified by age, sex, race and Hispanic or Latino origin, family income, poverty status, education, place of residence, region of residence, and, where appropriate, health insurance coverage. The topics covered are health statu...

BACKGROUND Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a potentially reversible cause of disability in the elderly people. The published literature suggests that the MetS-disability association is likely to be complex, depending on co-existing risk factors and with possible variation for each of the specific MetS components. Further evidence is needed to understand the specific consequences of the MetS as a w...

BACKGROUND This article examines whether the neighbourhood environment influences intermediate cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors, such as obesity (body mass index [BMI]), and lifestyle factors, such as no physical activity and smoking, when adjusted for the individual socioeconomic status (SES). METHODS The study consists of face-to-face interviews from the Swedish Annual Level of Liv...