Abstract
Tirodkar MA, Song J, Chang RW, Dunlop DD, Chang HJ. Racial and ethnic differences in activities of daily living disability among the elderly: the case of Spanish speakers. Objective: To compare incident disability patterns across racial and ethnic groups. Design: Prospective cohort study with 6-year follow-up (1998-2004). Setting: National probability sample. Participants: A 1998 Health and Retirement Study sample of 12,288 non-Hispanic whites, 1952 African Americans, 575 Hispanics interviewed in Spanish (Hispanic-Spanish), and 518 Hispanics interviewed in English (Hispanic-English), older than 51 years, and free of disability at baseline. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measure: Disability in activities of daily living (ADL) tasks (walking, dressing, transferring, bathing, toileting, feeding). Results: Hispanic-Spanish reported disproportionately lower rates of walking disability (standardized rates, 4.31% vs Hispanic-English [8.57%], black [7.54%], white [7.20%]) despite higher reported Hispanic-Spanish frequencies of lower-extremity dysfunction than other racial and ethnic groups. Across the 6 ADL tasks, the development of walking disability was most frequent among Hispanic-English subjects, African Americans, and whites. In contrast, Hispanic-Spanish subjects reported dressing as the most frequent ADL task disability, whereas walking ranked fourth. Conclusions: Aggregating all Hispanics, regardless of interview language, may be inappropriate. Future research on linguistic group differences in self-reported health outcomes is necessary to ensure that health status measures will be appropriate for use in diverse racial and ethnic groups.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1262-1266 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Archives of physical medicine and rehabilitation |
Volume | 89 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2008 |
Funding
This study used public data from the HRS, which is sponsored by the National Institute of Aging and conducted by the Institute of Social Research, University of Michigan.
Keywords
- Activities of daily living
- Hispanic Americans
- Rehabilitation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Rehabilitation
- Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation