Disablement Process in Mexican American Older Adults

描述(由申请人提供)：虚弱已被确定为老年人残疾、住院和死亡的先兆。在少数民族人群中，脆弱性还没有得到广泛的研究。我们建议对墨西哥裔美国老年人的定义明确的样本中的脆弱性进行检查。我们将确定力量、平衡、行走速度、认知、日常生活技能等脆弱成分的变化是否会影响一个人在社区中独立生活的能力。这项申请要求五年的资金，以延长和扩大我们目前的国家老龄研究所的赠款，题为“墨西哥裔美国老年人的赋能-禁用过程”。 拟议研究的具体目标是： 1.在定义明确的墨西哥裔美国老年人样本中应用脆弱的标准定义，以及 2.从横向和纵向两个方面考察了虚弱对墨西哥裔美国老年人的残疾、与健康相关的生活质量、住院和死亡率的影响。 数据将从1000名墨西哥裔美国老年人那里收集。参与者是西班牙裔老年人口流行病学研究(EPESE)的子样本。这项研究将与为西班牙裔EPESE收集的数据进行协调。面谈和绩效评估将在五年内进行两次。在我们目前的拨款中建立的评分员培训和数据收集方案将得到完善，并用于调查。脆弱性将作为使能-禁用模型的一个新组成部分，使用弗里德和他的同事开发的操作定义进行审查。旨在检验复杂变量随时间变化关系的分层线性建模和统计技术将被用来检验假设。这些模型将包括人口风险因素以及我们目前的研究表明与残疾、与健康相关的生活质量和死亡率相关的力量和晚年功能的标准化衡量标准。这些发现将扩大我们对虚弱如何影响迅速增长的墨西哥裔美国老年人口的独立性和生活质量的理解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Frailty has been identified as a precursor of disability, institutionalization and mortality in older adults. Frailty has not been extensively studied in minority populations. We propose to examine frailty in a well- defined sample of Mexican American older adults. We will determine whether changes in strength, balance, walking speed, cognition, daily living skills and other components of frailty impact a person's ability to live independently in the community. The application requests five years of funding to extend and expand our current National Institute on Aging grant entitled "The Enabling-Disabling Process in Mexican American Older Adults." The Specific Aims for the proposed research are to: 1. Apply a standard definition of frailty in a well defined sample of Mexican American older adults, and 2. Examine the impact of frailty on disability, health related quality of life, institutionalization and mortality in Mexican American older adults cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Data will be collected from 1,000 Mexican American older adults. The participants are a sub-sample from the Hispanic Established Population Epidemiologic Study of the Elderly (EPESE). The study will be coordinated with data collected for the Hispanic EPESE. In-person interviews and performance-based assessments will be conducted two times over five years. Rater training and data collection protocols established in our current grant will be refined and used in the investigation. Frailty will be examined as a new component of the Enabling-Disabling Model using an operational definition developed by Fried and colleagues. Hierarchical linear modeling and statistical techniques designed to examine relationships among complex variables over time will be used to test hypotheses. The models will include demographic risk factors and standardized measures of strength and late life function that our current research has shown are related to disability, health related quality of life, and mortality. The findings will extend our understanding of how frailty impacts independence and quality of life in the rapidly expanding Mexican American older adult population.