About two thirds of a sample of people over 65 years of age living in Portugal assess their health status as unhealthy. This perception is strongly associated with factors such as pain, memory loss and loneliness. The results are from a study by Maria Piedade Brandão, a professor at the University of Aveiro and researcher at CINTESIS – Center for Health Technology and Services Research, and Margarida Fonseca, from the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICBAS).
Researchers analyzed and compared perceptions of threats to health and well-being among elderly people in Portugal and Poland, two European countries that are below average in measures such as income and wealth
According to the researchers, 69.2% of the Portuguese elderly classified their health status as reasonable or bad, and 66.5% of the Polish elderly said the same. In our country, gender and marital status are related to their perceptions in this area. Thus, women are more likely to rate their health as reasonable or bad, while widowed people are more likely to consider themselves unhealthy.
In both countries, the probability of perceiving the health status as unhealthy increases if the person does not have enough money by the end of the month. Among the Portuguese sample, about a quarter of the elderly reported having reached the end of each month without money for their expenses, a percentage higher than that found in Poland (14.8%). The study reports the low level of education among the elders as one of the possible explanations for this disparity.
Among the analyzed variables, pain is present in more than 80% of the studied elderly who are said to be unhealthy. After all, it is concluded that Portuguese elderly people with pain have a nine times greater risk of reporting a reasonable or unsatisfactory health status.
Also, shortness of breath during day-to-day activities and mental problems such as loneliness and memory loss are clearly associated with more negative perceptions about health and well-being. Loneliness is one of the most important threats to take into account. According to this study, 71.9% of the evaluated elderly who consider themselves unhealthy, say they feel alone and more than half of those who consider themselves healthy report this feeling.
With a total of 480 adults over 65 years of age (247 Portuguese and 233 Polish), this study shows that problems of vision, pain, memory loss, difficulty in breathing and loneliness are threats to the perception of health and well- being by the elderly of the two countries, despite the sociodemographic differences between these countries.
For Maria Piedade Brandão, the results can help detect, prevent, and fight the main threats associated with ageing, as well as contribute to the development of health strategies at a national and a European level.
Data from the OECD – Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development indicate that older people over 65 already represent more than 20% of the Portuguese population. In Poland, this percentage is 15%.