Autopercepção de saúde, prevalência de doenças crônicas e nível de atividade física em idosos do meio urbano e rural

Abstract

The Brazilian health politics has an important debate about the rapid process of ageing in the population, which has demographic and epidemiological consequences. This transition is characterized by an increase in non communicable diseases (NCDs) and by a decrease in fertility and mortality rates. Thus, investigating the different environments (urban and rural) and the needs of the elderly, with the purpose of identifying factors that influence the aging process as well as understanding how this population perceives their condition, is very important. The objective of this study was to compare health self-perception, prevalence of chronic diseases and physical activity level among the elderly living inurban and rural areas of Santa Maria / RS. The approach was by home visits. The investigation was conducted in the urban and rural areas of city of Santa Maria, that has 41 neighborhoods and 9 districts, from which 202 older adults of three neighborhoods and 72 from three rural districts, with different socioeconomic levels, were selected. The elderly who presented cognitive decline or lived in long-term care institutions were excluded. The health characteristics and health perception were collected with an anamnesis, cognitive screening was done using the minimental state examination and physical activity level was evaluated using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire validated for Brazilianelderly. The data distribution was verified through the Kruskall-Wallis test. For the comparison between groups, the two-tailed Student`s T test for independent variables was used, and for the non-parametric variables, the Mann-Whitney test. The Chi-square test was used for comparisons of categorical variables. The significance level adopted was 5% in all tests. It was observed in urban and rural areas, a greater prevalence of elderly female (61.54%), aged between 60 and 69 years (50.96%), with a positive health perception (51.92%) and with high use of medication (89.90%). It was shown that the older adults, generally, are more active in transportation (48.08%) and inactive at leisure (83.65%). It was concluded that there is statistically significant difference between housing areas, highlighting the prevalence of chronic diseases in the rural group, with higher percentage of hypertension (74.63%) and dyslipidemia (23.88%). It was noted that the urban group is more active in leisure (19.86%), while in the rural group only 8.96% were classified as active and 91.04% as inactive. The results lead to the need of a more careful look when it comes to the elderly, knowing well both the rural and urban settings, when establishing health strategies with this population.