Factors associated with the life-space assessment in community-dwelling older adults requiring support.
Kodai Hosaka, Makoto Uchinoura, Hiroshi Otao and 1 others
Among 63 older adults certified as requiring support, maximum gait speed was the only physical measure stably linked to how far they went out.
Pain-related disability showed a weaker, less stable link. Gait speed matters more than chair-stand reps or balance for this group's mobility.
Key findings
1Maximum gait speed was the strongest and most stable predictor of life-space score (standardized β = 0.53, 95% CI 0.25–0.82, p = 0.001), remaining significant in bootstrap resampling.
2Pain Disability Assessment Scale total score was also significantly associated with life-space (β = −0.25, 95% CI −0.49 to −0.02, p = 0.037), but the association was attenuated in bootstrap analysis with the upper confidence bound reaching 0.00.
3In exploratory item-level analysis, pain-related disability in jogging slowly (ρ = −0.42) and shopping (ρ = −0.42) showed the strongest negative correlations with life-space after false-discovery-rate adjustment.
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What it does not show
All 63 participants came from one day-service program in a single city, so they were relatively active older adults already engaged in a preventive program; the findings may not apply to more isolated or more impaired patients. The design is cross-sectional, so the associations cannot be read as gait speed causing wider life-space or vice versa. With 63 participants and nine regression parameters, the authors acknowledged a risk of overfitting; the pain-disability association did not survive bootstrap resampling, which is a direct consequence of this small sample. Maximum gait speed was measured with a single fast-gait trial, which the authors flagged as a reliability concern in a group with a mean age over 80. Social, environmental, and motivational factors that influence whether someone goes out were not measured, leaving residual confounding possible.
Declared interests
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the pain-disability association as a firm, actionable finding. It was not stably reproduced in bootstrap resampling (the upper confidence bound reached 0.00), and the cross-sectional design means no causal direction can be inferred. The only robust result in this paper is the gait-speed association, and even that comes from a single-site sample of 63 already-active older adults.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →