Determinants of participation in a post-hospitalization physical exercise program for older adults

Background: Older patients often experience a decline in physical function and cognitive status after hospitalization. Although interventions involving physical exercise are effective in improving functional performance, participation in physical exercise interventions among older individuals is low. We aimed to identify factors that contribute to exercise refusal among post-hospitalized older patients. Methods: A cross-sectional study of recruitment data from a randomized controlled trial was conducted involving 495 hospitalized people ≥70 years old. Sociodemographic and clinical data were obtained from the Basque Public Health System database. We determined physical function with the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB), nutritional status with the Mini-Nutritional Assessment, frailty according to the Fried phenotype criteria, and cognitive function with the Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire (SPMSQ). Student’s t, Mann-Whitney U, or chi-squared tests were applied for bivariate analysis. Parameters significantly associated with participation were introduced in a logistic multivariate regression model. Results: Among the analyzed patients, 88.8% declined participation in the physical exercise program. Multivariate regression revealed that older age (OR: 1.13; 95% CI: 1.07–1.19), poor nutritional status (OR: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.69–0.95), and reduced home accessibility (OR: 0.27; 95% CI: 0.08–0.94) were predictors of participation refusal. Moreover, patients who declined participation had worse performance on the SPPB (P < 0.05) and its tests of balance, leg strength, and walking speed (P < 0.05). No differences were found between groups in other variables. Conclusions: This study confirms low participation of older adults in a post-hospitalization physical exercise program. Non-participation was associated with increased age, poor nutritional status, and reduced home accessibility. Our findings support the need for intervention design that accounts for these factors to increase older patient participation in beneficial exercise programs. Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12619000093189, (date: January 22, 2019, retrospectively registered). [--]

Subject

Older people, Participation, Physical exercise, Post-hospitalization

Publisher

BioMed Central

Published in

BMC Geriatrics, (2020) 20:408

Departament

Universidad Pública de Navarra. Departamento de Ciencias de la Salud / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa. Osasun Zientziak Saila

Publisher version

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-020-01821-3

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/2454/39911

Sponsorship

The study was funded by the Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture (2016111138) and a Programme Contract of the Department of Health, both departments of the Government of the Basque Country, which provided financial support during the research.

Appears in Collections

© The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.