The Relationship between Visual Constructive Abilities and Activity of Daily Living in Home Dwelling Elderly Population

Abstract

Objectives Cognitive deficits are one of the most severe impairments which lead to disability in seniors.\rThe investigations showed that about 5% of 60 years and older people suffer obvious cognitive impairments.\rAs a cognitive sub-scale, reduced visual abilities are related to doing activities, so Cognitive skills\respecially visual constructive skills, are one of the most important predictors of dependency in aging and\ridentifying its problems have a considerable impact in their independency in daily living skills, besides\rSelf-care can be viewed as a practice performed by individuals for their own benefit, to maintain life and\rwellbeing and is a key element in the proper maintenance of independency. Activity of daily living (ADL)\rcan display personal life independency and is considered as a morbidity index. To determine whether\rcognitive impairment is associated with changes in self-care behavior and Activities of daily living in older\rsubjects we assess visual abilities and activity of daily living.\rMethods & Materials In this cross-sectional study, 47 individuals aged 60 to 80 years were recruited from\rJahandidegan club in Shiraz using simple random sampling. Data were collected through observation\rand interview. Then they were evaluated by "visual constructive ability" sub-scale from LOTCA battery to\rassess associated skill and "Katz Index" to assess their ADL. SPSS software and Pearson correlation test\rwere used for data analysis.\rResults The mean age of the included samples (9 women and 38 men) was 69.94±4.66 years. Poorer\rscores in cognitive domains predicted functional decline in some sub scales. There was a significant correlation\rbetween visual constructive ability with eating and dressing (P≥0.05); however, no significant\rcorrelation was found between this sub-scale with bathing, moving, toileting, and bowel control and also\rbetween the total score of two tests.\rConclusion According to this research, there was a significant correlation between visual constructive\rabilities and dressing and eating activities. According to the fact that Basic ADLs are associated with\rmotor function, whereas instrumental ADLs are typically correlated to cognitive functions and also basic\ractivities of daily living (BADL) are part of daily life schedule, they may have converted to habituations\rand routines in daily living. As a result, a weak correlation was observed between cognition and personal\rindependency that may result from the less demanding cognitive processing tasks. Katz Index only evaluates\rpersonal independency in basic activities of daily living and does not consider their implications\rwhile aging has an impact on performing activities and in many cases the work is finally able to run in spite of many mistakes.