gms | German Medical Science

Functional ability can be conceptualized as the dynamic interaction of an older adult’s physiological status, the emotional or psychological environment, and the external or physical and social environment. Participating in everyday activities is vital to human development. Through participation, we acquire skills; connect to other people and find purpose and meaning in life [1]. Elderly people must maintain their capacity for Activity of Daily Living (ADL) to support a good quality of life [2]. Assessing functional status is one of the mainstays in clinical evaluation. Certain of these activities are classified as Basic Activities of Daily Living, (PADL) and other as Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL). The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between activities of daily living, quality of life, health, balance and walking.

In a random sample of 307 women aged 75 years or more, registrations of quality of life, activities of daily living, health, balance and walking were recorded.

The ADL data were subjected to exploratory factor analyses, resulting the two factors named “Personal ADL (PADL) and Instrumental ADL (IADL). Factor PADL contain four items: grooming, dressing, toileting and eating. Factor IADL contained three items: shopping, preparing one’s own meal, doing heavy housework. Regarding PADL, 90,6% received full score and regarding IADL 53,3% had full score. Age was correlated to IADL (r=0.31) not PADL. All of the items bivariate significant related to PADL was also significant associated with IADL. These were number of diseases drugs used, walking in a figure of eight, one legged stance, self-reported health, feeling healthy or unhealthy, functional reach, quality of life, comfortable walking speed, maximal walking speed and timed up and go. In addition tandem stance, visual impairment, bad performance on the Mini-Mental State Examination, visual impairment, number of diseases and age were in the bivariate analysis related to bad performance in IADL

Regression analysis showed that age, walking in a figure of eight, subjective health, functional reach and quality of life were all significant independently related to the score of IADL and walking in a figure of eight, subjective health and functional reach were all significant independently related to PADL.

For both PADL and IADL the strongest association were to performance based tests. Quality of life was in bivariate analyses related both to PADL and IADL. However , when controlling for the other variables in the multivariate analyses quality of life was only significant independently related to IADl, not PADL