The impact of Covid-19 pandemic to ageing process - development of Healthy Ageing Index (HAI-19) for Latvian population 

Description

Introduction: According to the WHO, healthy ageing is characterized by such interrelated determinants as intrinsic capacity, functional ability and environment. An individual's intrinsic capacity is a powerful predictor of the future ageing process and includes 5 areas - cognitive, psychological, sensory, locomotion and vitality. The ageing process of each older individual is different and regular assessment of ageing process is crucial, especially since Covid-19 pandemics. In order, to develop nationwide healthy ageing strategy, a tool for healthy ageing assessment is vital, however till now there is no standardized metric for the evaluation of healthy ageing and existing attempts are not covering all healthy ageing determinants.
Materials and methods: The data from Wave 8 of SHARE survey including Covid-19 add-on module (2019/2020) were used. To assess the impact of Covid-19 pandemic to ageing process Healthy Ageing Index (HAI-19) for Latvian population, aged 50+ years, (n=652) was constructed. Descriptive statistics as well as inferential statistics (PCA with Varimax rotation test, Cronbach’s alpha, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskall-Wallis H test) were used.
Results: The items were analyzed by exploratory factor analysis using the Principal Component Analysis. Investigation of initial communality and consequent extraction of factors by Varimax rotation method showed the share of 19 items in the questionnaire higher than 0.30, all other items were removed. The analysis yielded 5 dimensions explaining total of 57.40% of the variance.
Cronbach’s alpha for HAI-19 was 0.74.
All factors were transformed from Likert-type answers to points from 0 to 100 (where 0 points indicate of negative result (worsening status) and 100 points indicate more positive result). The mean value for each participant was calculated and further compared between various groups.
Conclusions: The findings indicate that short-term impact of Covid-19 pandemic can be associated with changes in cognitive, psychological and physical factors. In order to implement the necessary measures for reducing and preventing the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, further longitudinal research is needed.

Period	8 Jun 2022 → 10 Jun 2022
Event title	26th Nordic Congress of Gerontology
Event type	Congress
Conference number	26
Location	Odense, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International