Walking helps hospitalized seniors
Hospitalized elderly patients who take runescape accounts even short walks around a hospital unit tend to leave the hospital sooner than their more sedentary peers, a new U.S. study published on Friday suggests.
In the study, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) collected data from 162 hospitalized patients over age 65, each patient fitted with a pager-sized "step activity monitor" attached to his or her ankle -- an electronic device capable of counting every step the patient took.
"Using these monitors, we were able to see a correlation between even relatively small amounts of increased mobility and shorter lengths of stay in the hospital," Steve Fisher, a UTMB Health assistant professor, said in the study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on its website.
"We still found this effect after we used a statistical model to adjust for the differing runescape money severities of the patients' illnesses," said the study.
Clinicians have long recognized the importance of getting patients with orthopedic or neurologic conditions up and walking as soon as possible, but no such "standard of care" currently exists for older adults admitted for acute medical illnesses, the AAAS said.
It said the UTMB study could serve as a first step toward that goal and may also open the door to other improvements in hospital care for the elderly.
"Mobility is a key measure in older runescape gold people's independence and quality of life generally, and this study suggests that's also true in the hospital setting," said Fisher. "When we hospitalize elderly people, we set up a paradoxical situation: you can have a positive outcome of the acute problem that brought them there, but still have negative consequences as a result of extended immobility."
Mobility in the hospital as measured by an activity monitor could potentially become a kind of vital sign for the elderly as well as a tool that would help researchers find the minimal levels of activity necessary to protect elderly patients from long-term declines in function, said Fisher.
"This is very preliminary, but it's leading to a lot of questions right now that I think need to be answered," said UTMB Health professor Glenn Ostir, who also took part in the study.
"We know from other research that mobility is linked to older people's quality of life, independence, maintenance of healthy muscle mass, all these things. And so we need to look at this and say what is the impact of mobility in the hospital on the overall health of the older person once they leave runescape money the hospital," said Ostir.