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Pilot Program Helps Boost Seniors' Activity Levels, Quality of Life |
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From UCLA: Older adults often carry a deeply ingrained belief that inactive, sedentary lives are an inevitable part of aging. But this mindset is not just wrong, it can be changed --- with positive physical and mental health results. In a new UCLA study, researchers show that older adults who participated in a pilot test for a program aimed at changing this mindset became more physically active, increasing their walking levels by about 24 percent --- an average increase of 2.5 miles per week. "We can teach older adults to get rid of those old beliefs that becoming sedentary is just a normal part of growing older," said Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, assistant professor of geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the study's lead author. The researchers used a technique known as "attribution retraining" to effect a change among study participants about what it means to age and what to expect out of it. "The exciting part is that, to our knowledge, this attribution retraining component hasn't been tested in a physical activity intervention," Sarkisian said. The participants attended four weekly, hour-long group sessions led by a trained health educator who applied an attribution retraining curriculum. Participants were fitted with electronic pedometers, to be worn at all times, which measured the number of steps they took each week. They also completed surveys that gauged their expectations about aging --- higher scores indicated that participants expected high functioning with aging, while lower scores meant they expected physical and mental decline.
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