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Senior Citizens Can Add Quality Years to Life with
Exercise
Nov. 11, 2005 A new study has found that
previously sedentary senior citizens who incorporated exercise into
their lifestyles not only improved physical function, but experienced
psychological benefits as well.
Exercise is a lot like spinach
everybody knows
it's good for you; yet many people still avoid it, forgoing its
potential health benefits, say the authors.
But researchers at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, led by kinesiology professor Edward McAuley, who study
the effects of exercise on aging point to their new findings that may
inspire people to get up, get out and get moving on a regular basis.
"The implications of our work are that not only
will physical activity potentially add years to your life as we age, but
the quality of those years is likely to be improved by regular physical
activity," McAuley said.
The UI research indicated positive psychosocial and
cognitive outcomes -- in effect, significant quality-of-life gains --
among participants who remained physically active long after they began
an initial randomized, six-month exercise trial consisting of walking
and stretching/toning exercises. Results were gleaned from a battery of
surveys and assessments administered at one- and five-year intervals
following the initial exercise regimen.
McAuley said the study -- which assessed physical
activity levels, quality of life, physical self-esteem, self-efficacy
and affect in a large sample (174) of adults over age 65 -- is believed
to be the only one to date to examine the relationship between physical
activity and quality of life over such a long time.
"Self-efficacy," McAuley noted, can be defined as
"the belief, or self-confidence, in one's capacity to successfully carry
out a task"; while "affect" refers to reported levels of happiness or
contentment.
The researchers found that participants who
continued to be physically active a year after baseline responses were
recorded -- through engagement in leisure, occupational or home
activities, such as house-cleaning or gardening -- were "fitter, had
higher levels of self-efficacy and physical self-esteem, expressed more
positive affect and reported, in turn, a better quality of life."
Increased physical activity over time, as indicated
by results of the five-year follow-up, "was associated with greater
improvements in self-esteem and affect. Enhanced affect was, in turn,
associated with increases in satisfaction with life over time," the
researchers noted.
"Our findings are important on several fronts,"
McAuley said. "First, we demonstrated that physical activity has
long-term effects on important aspects of psychosocial functioning
through its influences on self-efficacy, quality of life and
self-esteem."
"Second, there is a growing interest in the
relationship between physical activity and quality of life, especially
in older adults. However, much of this work suggests a direct
relationship between the two. Our work takes the approach, and the data
support it, that physical activity influences more global aspects of
quality of life through its influence on more proximal physical and
psychological factors such as affect, self-efficacy and health status."
A related, two-year study conducted in McAuley's
lab looked at the roles played by physical activity, health status and
self-efficacy in determining "global quality of life," or satisfaction
with life among older adults. The research focused on a different sample
of 249 older black and white women. Results of that study will be
published in an article titled "Physical Activity and Quality of Life in
Older Adults: Influence of Health Status and Self-Efficacy" in a
forthcoming edition of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
In that study, the researchers tested three
potentially competing models of the physical activity/quality-of-life
relationship and ultimately concluded that their findings "offer a
strong theoretical foundation for understanding physical activity and
quality-of-life relationships in older adults."
McAuley said the study's results confirm earlier
findings by other researchers suggesting "changes in levels of
functioning in older adults with chronic conditions were not predicted
simply by health status or disease state, but also by physical activity
and self-efficacy."
In other words, he said, there is a tendency among
adults with lower self-expectations of their physical abilities to give
up -- to reduce the number of activities they engage in as well as the
degree of effort they expend toward that end.
"These reductions, in turn, provide fewer
opportunities to experience successful, efficacy-enhancing behaviors
leading to further reductions in efficacy," McAuley said. "Our data
would suggest that such declines are likely to lead to subsequent
reductions in health status and, ultimately, quality of life."
Results of the study appear in an article titled
"Physical Activity Enhances Long-Term Quality of Life in Older Adults:
Efficacy, Esteem and Affective Influences," published in the current
issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine. Co-authors with McAuley on
the report are UI kinesiology professor Robert W. Motl; psychology
professor Ed Diener; and current and former graduate students Steriani
Elavsky, Liang Hu, Gerald J. Jerome, James F. Konopack and David X.
Marquez.
Co-authors of the study with McAuley are Motl;
kinesiology and psychology professor Karl R. Rosengren; and graduate
students Konopack, Shawna E. Doerksen and Katherine S. Morris.
The research was funded by grants from the National
Institute on Aging.
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