Quedas e características de idosos caidores durante a pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing may have facilitated a progressive decline in the functionality of the elderly associated with a reduced level of physical activity and potential susceptibility to falls, which are the second leading cause of death from unintentional injury in Worldwide. Thus, this work described the frequency of falls and compared characteristics of elderly fallers and non-fallers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a cross-sectional observational study, of a descriptive nature, carried out with elderly people from Ceará, through an internet interview and a call from August 2020 to January 2021. sociodemographic data, comorbidities, social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, number of musculoskeletal pain sites, physical activity and sedentary behavior, functionality and falls were collected. We compared elderly fallers and non-fallers in terms of falls and age, sedentary behavior, level of physical activity, number of sites of pain, functionality and social distancing. The descriptive analysis of the sample was presented using means and standard deviations for quantitative variables and absolute and relative frequencies for categorical variables. The analysis using the Levene test guided the comparisons of continuous data using the Mann-Whitney-U test between groups of elderly fallers and non-fallers. For categorical variables, the Chi-square test was selected. The significance level for the analyzes was 0.05. Of the 192 elderly included, 67.7% (n=130) were women and the average age of the elderly was 67.99 (± 6.75) years, with most of them (84%) performing social distancing. Of the total, 18% (n=34) of the supervised elderly had fallen since the beginning of the pandemic, with only 23.5% (n=8) being recurrent fallers (more than 2 falls since the beginning of the pandemic). There was no difference in age (p=0.17), sedentary behavior (p=0.57), physical activity level (p=0.05), number of pain sites (p=0.84) and functionality ( p=0.08) between fallers and non-fallers. It is concluded that the frequency of falls among the elderly was low and below the world average, and there was no difference in the variables age, sedentary behavior, level of physical activity, number of sites of pain and functionality between elderly fallers and non-fallers. Thus, the need to monitor the long-term repercussions of the pandemic period on falls in the elderly is suggested, so that we can better understand this context and intervene appropriately and early as health professionals.