Article

OBJECTIVE: To characterize the manner of functional status difficulties with age
across multiple functional domains: lower extremity function, upper extremity
function, and cognitive/social function. Construct validity of a functional
status measure composed of these domains was assessed as part of this goal.
DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey of the community-dwelling civilian population in
the United States. SETTING: Community. PARTICIPANTS: Community-dwelling adults
aged 60 years and older (N=7968). INTERVENTIONS: Not applicable. MAIN OUTCOME
MEASURES: Model fit of a 20-item functional status measure to a confirmatory
factor analysis model was assessed with the root mean square error of
approximation and the root mean square residual. Functional status benchmarks for
age were developed with curves plotting activity difficulty percentiles versus
age for the general U.S. population. RESULTS: The 20-item activity difficulty
index modeled as a 3-factor construct had a root mean square error of
approximation of .045 and a root mean squared residual of .052, indicating good
fit. Benchmarks based on percentiles show that the median activity difficulty
score is quite low for the full range studied but that there is a steady increase
with increasing age. The domain regarding cognition and social function appeared
to be less sensitive than the upper and lower extremity skills domains to
increasing age. CONCLUSIONS: A broad measure of difficulty with functional
activities can be meaningfully treated as a 3-domain construct. The scores
represented by the index measuring this construct can be used to compare patients
to a national sample of age-matched individuals to assess functional status using
normative values.
CI - Copyright (c) 2014 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS