Exploring patterns of daily physical and sedentary behaviour in community-dwelling older adults

Abstract

Background: recent evidence suggests that the interaction between periods of sedentary and activity behaviour is important for health; providing distinctive information to assessment of activity alone. This study quantified activity and sedentary behaviour in older, community-dwelling adults.

Methods: fifty-six community-dwelling older adults with an average age 79 (SD) years wore an ActivPAL accelerometer for 7 days and were assessed for a range of motor, cognitive and affective characteristics. Seven variables derived from accelerometry considered to represent four characteristics of habitual behaviour (volume, frequency, intensity and variability) were submitted to principal components factor analysis (PCA). Factor scores were retained and used as dependent variables in regression analysis.

Results: three significant orthogonal factors emerged from the PCA, accounting for 80% of the variance in test scores: 'walking behaviour' which accounted for 39% of variance in the model; 'sedentary behaviour' explaining 24.3% of total variance; and 'postural transitions' which accounted for 16.7% of total variance. For the regression analysis, younger age and lower body mass index (BMI) emerged as significant predictors of physical behaviour, explaining 36% of the total variance. For postural transitions, lower BMI was the unique contributor, explaining 15% of total variance. Significant predictors of sedentary behaviours were not identified.

Conclusions: walking, sedentary and transitory behaviours are distinct from each other, and together explain daily function. Further research on a larger sample is indicated to explore the characteristics that explain these behaviours, in particular the interplay between sedentary behaviour and periods of physical activity.