Elderly Health Journal

Introduction: Recent medical and health care improvement caused a remarkable increase in humans' life expand and subsequent increase in aging population. Beside life expectancy, quality of life is at the same importance, so the study aimed to explore the relation between quality of life and lifestyle among older adults in Yazd.

Methods: The cross-sectional study was carried out on 270 elderly people over 60 years old. A cluster random sampling was used to recruit the participant from 10 selected clusters in the Yazd city with at least 27 participants from each cluster. 12 item Short Form Health Survey and Iranian Elderly Lifestyle Questionnaire was used for data collection. Data analyzed with descriptive frequency distribution and also χ², and Pearson correlation coefficient tests using SPSS software.

Results: The mean score of quality of life was 69.06 ± 20.97 (range 0-100) and the mean score of lifestyle was 161.91 ± 13.95 (range 42-211). Quality of life and lifestyle had statistically significant relation with age, sex, education level, marriage status, retirement status, having job, income source, digestive problems, depression, joint pain, osteoporosis, hypertension, fall and sleep disorder. There was also a direct association between lifestyle and quality of life.

Conclusion: Results indicated that most of the participants are at a desirable level of lifestyle and quality of life. However quality of life is in relation with some demographic factors and chronic conditions that must be addressed in interventional programs aimed at increasing the quality of life among aging population.

Introduction: Advances in medical and health sciences have led to increase in the number of older people. The most common non- communicable diseases can be prevented by following a healthy lifestyle. This study aimed to investigate the lifestyle of elderly people by reviewing the literatures and background of the previous researches in order to obtain a holistic view about lifestyle.

Methods: A fast literature review was conducted applying retrospective approach to identify the status of lifestyle among older people. For this purpose, the related references with keywords involving 'lifestyle', 'elderly people', 'aging', and 'multiple chronic conditions' were electronically searched in databases ‘All Academic’, ‘ISI web of knowledge’, ‘PsycNET’, ‘Social Sciences Citation Index’, and ‘PubMed’ from 2002 to 2015.

Results: 26 related articles were finalised and reviewed according to the study aims. The results showed that those people with an inappropriate lifestyle were more likely to die because of health difficulty reasons. Improving healthy lifestyle including dietary habits, weight control, physical activity, smoking cessation, managing stressful life events, and social capital were closely related with reduced risk of all-cause mortality.

Conclusion: It seems that the awareness about the relationship between healthy lifestyle and incidence of multiple chronic conditions among older people may be effective in understanding of the potential health consequences of their performance, and also in modifying lifestyle.