Elderly people with limited mobility: their families and the implications of their dependency

RESUMEN

Introduction and objectives: The family has suffered several changes throughout the times, leading to many elderly people living alone or with other elderly. In a family the situation of the elderly that depended on others can compromise the family's relationships, which leads to little availability to motivate them to mobilization. The objective of the study was to understand the way the family functions in view of to the dependence of the elderly with limited mobility in a community context. Methodology: Descriptive study, exploratory of a quantitive character. The data was gathered through a questionnaire, including the Lawton & Brody (1969) scales, the lifestyle profile (Nahas, 2013) and the familiar APGAR (Smilkstein, 1978). Non-probabilistic sample, composed by 1298 elderly with limited mobility, from 26 civil parishes from the municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão. Results and discussion: Most of the people polled considered that his own family was a functional one (64.8%) and 49.6% were moderately dependent. By analysing the physical activity lifestyle profile and the familiar functionality one could con-clude that 65.2% had a positive profile, presenting typical behaviours of an active lifestyle. We think that the fact that 73.1% are inserted in functional families had something to do with it. We have verified a perfect association (p = 0.000) between dependency, lifestyle physical activity and familiar functionality - APGAR. Conclusions: The results show that the family determines the lifestyle physical acti-vity and the elderly's dependency. A functional family influences a positive physical activity profile, even in the elderly with limited mobility