Health profile of elderly users of a town public program of physical activity: a cross-sectional study

• Autor(a) principal: Dourado, Fernando Matos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Oliveira, Nórton Luís, Helal, Lucas, Ricardo, Luiza Isnardi Cardoso, Santos, Leandro dos, De Nardi, Angélica Trevisan, Botton, Cíntia Ehlers, Pfeifer, Lucineia Orsolin, Vasques, Laura Milán, Santos, Lucas Porto, Moraes, Bruna Góes, da Silva, Larissa Xavier Neves, Umpierre, Daniel
• Tipo de documento: preprint
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: SciELO Preprints
• Texto Completo: https://preprints.scielo.org/index.php/scielo/preprint/view/1678
• topic: elderly; physical activity; exercise; public health; community programs; physical activity; elderly; public health; community programs; exercise

The assessment of health profile in users attending such public programs may optimize tailoring of interventions oriented to reduce the risk or incidence of lifestyle-driven diseases, resulting in a potential impact on public health. Therefore, this cross-sectional study aimed to characterize the health profile of the elderly participants in the physical activity public program in southern Brazil. Therefore, we included 11 community exercise centers managed by the city of Porto Alegre (Brazil). We used simple random sampling, with sample size weight by the number of participants in each individual center. Several health domains were measured by self-reported questionnaires (e.g., cardiovascular risk factors and quality of life), office blood pressure measurements, blood assessments (i.e., lipid profile and HbA1c) and functional tests (i.e., 6-minute walk test and handgrip strength) between April/2018 to February/2019. The results are mostly reported using descriptive statistics. We observed that high self-reported prevalences regarded to cardiovascular risk factors, more specifically for sleep disorder (55%), hypercholesterolemia (54%) and hypertension (49%). Among self-reported diseases, the participants listed cardiovascular diseases (14%), previous cancer (15%), diabetes (13%), arthritis (30%), and depression (19%). The results observed in the 6-minute walk test (mean±sd 498±78.95 m) and handgrip test (mean±sd 27±8.13 kg) showed the expected levels for active elderly. Overall, the prevalences presented herein allow to contrast the estimated prevalences of older adults using a public program of physical activity to other populational estimates or single studies, fostering the future monitoring of assessments and interventions in sensible conditions (e.g., hypertension, sleep disorder) for this population.