Functional capacity and fragility of the elderly with pulmonar tuberculosis sequelae

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious and contagious disease, with a chronic evolution that is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, as it is considered a chronic disease among the aged because it can cause sequelae and result in impaired lung capacity and thus contribute to a clinical picture of worse prognosis it is interesting to study the relationship between TB and frailty syndrome and functional capacity in the old age. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the functional capacity of elderly people with pulmonary TB sequelae treated at a pulmonology service in Belém-PA, and to investigate the occurrence of frailty in this population. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study with the quantitative-correlational method, conducted from August to November 2017 at the physiotherapy outpatient clinic of the João de Barros Barreto University Hospital, Belém/PA. Frailty by the Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI) instrument and functional capacity by the "ADL-Glittre Test" (TGlittre) were evaluated. The "Spearman correlation" between TFI and TGlittre was used. P-value was adopt-ed≤0.05. RESULTS: The average age was 68,37 ± 6.01 years, 66.7% were female, all individ-uals were literate, the majority with incomplete primary education (45.8%). The presence of frailty was 70.5% (95% CI 48.9-87.4), with a female predominance (82.4%). The average time on TGlittre was 5,77 ± 1,71 minutes. There was a moderate positive correlation between TFI and TGlittre (p=0.42, p= 0.03). CONCLUSION: This study identified frailty and functional impairment in the elderly with pulmonary TB sequelae, with a high prevalence of frailty com-pared to other Brazilian studies with the elderly population, besides presenting a moderate positive correlation between functional capacity and frailty, suggesting that these aspects de-serve special attention in rehabilitation programs for functional maintenance or recovery in this profile of patients.