Lifestyle of The Elderly and Its Predictive Factors

Abstract

Lifestyle of the elderly affects their psychological and physical health significantly and causes some changes in communication patterns or their social activities. Therefore, we decided to investigate its predictive factors. This study is a descriptive-analytical paper and the studied population was all the elderly living in Tehran and lacking any cognitive disorders. There were 400 old people aged 60 years or over than, which had been randomly selected from five areas of Tehran (north, south, center, east and west). Data collection tool was a questionnaire including two parts namely demographic and life style of the elderly (exercise, nutrition, interpersonal relationships, prevention, and stress management) which were filled out by interview. The results of the current research represent that 95% of the old people who live in Tehran have a medium life style, 1% of them have a favorable situation and 4% of them are in an unpleasant condition. Moreover, it is found that there is a statistically significant relationship between lifestyle and job, education, coexistence type, suffering from chronic disease (P=0.000) and place of residence (P=0.006). The results of multi-factorial linear regression analysis showed that as people get older, their lifestyle score will decrease meaningfully (P=0.000). With regard to the relationship detected between lifestyle and some factors such as education, coexistence type, suffering from chronic disease and job among the old people, it is recommended that the health-care administers pay more attention in their educational programs toward the key role of related and predictive factors in promoting lifestyle and, subsequently, improve the health of the elderly using continuous and scheduled educations concerned with healthy lifestyle.