Optimistic seniors recover better after hip fracture
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Hip fracture patients who have a positive outlook on life may fare better after hospitalization than their more depressed counterparts, study findings show.
“This study found that elderly patients with hip fracture with high positive affect had better recovery on three performance-based measures than patients with low positive affect and depressive symptoms,” write study author Dr. Lisa Fredman, of Boston University, and her colleagues.
Each year, approximately 340,000 seniors in the US experience hip fracture.
Fredman and her team assessed 432 men and women, aged 65 years and older, who were hospitalized for hip fracture between 1990 and 1991.
Seniors with a more positive outlook more frequently reported that they were happy, enjoyed life, felt hopeful about the future, and felt that they were just as good as other people.
At various follow-up points throughout the two-year study, seniors who scored higher in positive affect—as did slightly more than a third (36 percent) of study subjects—walked faster and stood from a chair more quickly than did the 13 percent of seniors with low positive affect, or the 51 percent with depressive symptoms.
The differences in walking speeds were small, but they could have “major implications for daily activities,” according to Fredman and her co-authors.
“For example,” they write, “if a traffic light allows 30 seconds for crossing a 10-m-wide street, the average patient with high positive affect and low positive affect could cross comfortably at their usual pace at 6 months, walking 12.3 m in 30 seconds, whereas the depressed patient could walk 10.5 m and would barely cross the street before the light changed.”
Overall, seniors who consistently scored high in positive affect also exhibited the best functioning throughout the follow-up period, the report indicates.
“This study adds to other studies that have found beneficial effects of high positive affect on health outcomes and recovery from illness and surgery in elderly adults,” the researchers conclude.
“From a clinical standpoint, these results suggest that more-intensive interventions delivered early in the postfracture recovery period would improve the functional performance of patients who are depressed or have low positive affect at the time of their hospitalization,” they add.
SOURCE: Journal of the American Geriatric Society, July 2006.
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