Physical and Psychological Problems of the Elderly at Aged Care Center

Authors

  • Meena Gyawali
  • Dr. Rafiqul Huda Chaudhury
  • Dr. Ravi Roshan Khadka

Abstract

As the world is aging, there is a growing interest in various morbidity patterns among the elderly population. This study aims to find out the physical and psychological problems among elderly people and to determine the factors associated with the problems. A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out among 46 elderly people who were residents at the Aged Care Center in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Elderly aged 60 years & above were selected purposefully for the study. Physical disability, geriatric depression, cognitive impairment was assessed using the Barthel index, Geriatric depression scale, Elderly Cognitive Assessment Questionnaire respectively. The association between sociodemographic data and physical disability, depression and cognitive impairment were also evaluated by using bivariate analysis. The mean age of the respondents was 73.3 ± 7.41 years and among them 52% were females. Among the participants, the prevalence of physical disabilities was 17.39% and the commonest problem was climbing the stairs. The Prevalence of cognitive impairment was 13.04% and the commonest impairment was found in memory recall. The Prevalence of geriatric depression was 32.6%. The prevalence of depression and cognitive impairment were higher among unmarried, illiterate and unemployed respondents. Overall physical and psychological impairment was higher in the age group 80 to 89 years and also in females. Increasing age, particularly those who belonged to age group 80-89 years were at significant risk for physical disability, depression and cognitive impairment.Key Words: Elderly People, Physical Health Problem, Psychological Health Problem

Author Biographies

Meena Gyawali

Dr. Rafiqul Huda Chaudhury

Dr. Ravi Roshan Khadka

Downloads

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

Terms and conditions of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License apply to all published manuscripts. This Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This licence allows authors to use all articles, data sets, graphics and appendices in data mining applications, search engines, web sites, blogs and other platforms by providing appropriate reference. The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions and will retain publishing rights without restrictions.

A competing interest exists when professional judgment concerning the validity of research is influenced by a secondary interest, such as financial gain. We require that our authors reveal all possible conflicts of interest in their submitted manuscripts.


The Editor reserves the right to shorten and adjust texts. Significant changes in the text will be agreed with the Authors.