Regular practice of physical activity and sedentarism: influence on female elderly’s quality of life

Abstract

The study aims to compare the Quality of Life (QV) of female elderly practicing regular physical activity and sedentary female elderly in the physical, psychological, social and environmental domains. This is a descriptive, observational and cross study. The Mini Mental State Examination (Folstein, FOLSTEIN and MCHUG, 1975; BERTOLUCCI et al, 1994) was applied, including the illiterate who had scores above 18 and the literate with scores above 14.The sample was divided into two groups: Physical Activity Group (AF), 16 female elderly, practicing regular physical activity, sedentary group (SE), 15 sedentary female elderly. An identification questionnaire and quality of life questionnaire WHOQOL-bref (FLECK, 2000) was applied. The average age was 70.8 (± 7) years in the AF group and 69.7 (± 6.2) years in SE group. In WHOQOL-bref, the average scores of the AF and SE groups and were, respectively: 74.8 (± 12.9) and 60.2 (± 20.2) in the physical domain; 68.8 (± 11.6) and 60,8 (± 20.9) in the psychological; 78.1 (± 10) and 66.1 (± 22.2) in the social; 66.8 (± 11.5) and 57.5 (± 15.4) in the environmental domain. The regular practice of physical activity provided in the AF group higher scores in the WHOQOL-bref, with statistically significant differences in social (p = 0.050) and environmental (p = 0.047) when compared to SE group. In the physical domain, the AF group showed difference (p = 0.054) but not statistically significant. These results allow us to conclude that the active lifestyle adopted by the female elderly practitioners of regular physical activity was able to improve QL of them, compared with the sedentary female elderly.