| Research Abstract |
In June, 2005, an amendment to the Home Care Insurance Law passed the national Diet for the establishment of a sustainable care insurance system for home-cared elderly-people. One of the points in this amendment was the creation of a new preventive benefit for the prevention of decline in physical functions of mildly disabled people. For the prolongation of the healthy lifespan and control of the medical cost and care insurance premium, it is the most desirable that healthy people remain healthy forever. However, intervention for disability prevention, i.e., intervention in frail elderly people, particularly those to whom an insurance benefit is not applied and those at a low disability grade, is urgently needed. In the intervention for disability prevention in such elderly people, the most important consideration is to minimize the decline in physical fitness and exercise ability necessary for the daily living. In Japan, however, there have not been many studies on physical fitness an
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d exercise ability or its maintenance and recovery in frail elderly people. In these circumstances, we designed a 2-year study to clarify the relationships of the state of physical fitness and exercise ability of frail elderly people with factors in their living and to prepare an exercise program for the intervention for disability prevention that can be incorporated in their daily living.
In the first year, we measured the physique, fitness (muscle strength, flexibility, balance, walking ability, etc.), and muscle mass in facility day-service users (70 people mostly at the need-of-support level or grade 1 need-of-care but some at grade 3 or 4 need-of-care) and clarified characteristics of these parameters in elderly people in need of care. This year, on the basis of the results obtained in the first year, we evaluated what support is necessary for the day-service staff to become able to provide an exercise session as part of the day-service program. We, then, helped the staff apply an exercise program to day-service users and measured changes in their fitness and pattern of daily living after 6 months. The results obtained this year suggest that the fitness level and muscle mass were maintained, that exacerbation of the need-of-care grade was small, that many day-service users looked forward to exercise sessions, and that they also wanted to exercise at home but actually did not. Less
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