The effects of a Simplified Tai-Chi Exercise Program (STEP) on the physical health of older adults living in long-term care facilities: A single group design with multiple time points☆
Section snippets
What is already known about the topic?
- 1.
Studies support the positive effects that Tai Chi has on the physical health of older adults.
- 2.
Many older adults residing in long-term care facilities feel too weak to practice traditional Tai Chi, and a more simplified style is preferred.
- 3.
A simplified Tai Chi style, called the Simplified Tai-Chi Exercise Program (STEP), was specifically designed for the older adults who frequently feature a variety of chronic illnesses.
What this paper adds
- 1.
The STEP intervention significantly decreased systolic and diastolic blood pressure of older adults resided in long-term care facilities.
- 2.
The special design and emphasis of STEP led to the significant improvement of hand-grip strength and lower body flexibility in addition to the decrease of blood pressure typically reported in Tai Chi studies.
Design
A single group design with multiple time points was employed. Before the implementation of STEP, data were collected once a month for three months to understand the impact of nature aging on the physical health of the elderly subjects; and then, four times after intervention started: one month, two months, three months, and six months to assess the change in older adults’ physical health status. The subjects served as their own control, thus avoiding the characteristics differences of the
Self-actualization of physical health status
As shown in Table 1, the mean SF-36 physical health status scores remained fairly stable from 54.9±6.8 at pre-test I to 58.6±6.9 at post-test IV (GEE ). Similar results were found when only available observations were used to fit a linear mixed model, using compound symmetry as the repeated covariance type . This was done as a form of sensitivity analysis to assess the effect of data imputation on the results. Moreover, the mean pre and post test scores were not significantly
Discussion
We investigated the effect of the STEP intervention on the physical health of older adults resided in long-term care facilities. Results of comparisons among three pre-tests indicated a significant deterioration in elderly subjects’ body flexibility before the STEP intervention. However, after one month of the STEP practice, subjects’ hand-gripping strength significantly improved, and at the end of six months intervention, the blood pressure, both systolic and diastolic, decreased. Yet, balance
Acknowledgments
Sincere appreciation is directed by our group to the National Science Council, Taiwan for funding this study (NSC 92-2314-B-242-002); to Professors Mariah Snyder and Frank Belcastro for their superlative manuscript editing; to the 51 wonderful participants and the staff of Nan-Tzy and Gang-Shan Veteran Homes for their generous participation. An abstract of this study was presented at the 16th International Nursing Research Congress, Waikoloa, Hawaii in July, 2005.
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The work was performed at Fooyin University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. This study was funded by the National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC 92-2314-B-242-002).