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. 2015 Aug;77(3):439-46.

The prevalence of homebound individuals in the elderly population: a survey in a city area in Japan

Hiroyuki Umegaki  1 , Madoka Yanagawa  1 , Hirotaka Nakashima  1 , Taeko Makino  1 , Masafumi Kuzuya  1
Affiliations

The prevalence of homebound individuals in the elderly population: a survey in a city area in Japan

Hiroyuki Umegaki et al. Nagoya J Med Sci. 2015 Aug.

Abstract

Being homebound has been reported to be associated with a number of conditions. In the current study, the incidence of homebound individuals was surveyed in an urban city area in Japan. The city office randomly enrolled 5,000 residents of Nagoya City aged 65 and over. A questionnaire was sent to their principal caregivers by mail, and 3,444 (68.9 %) subjects returned the survey. The investigators obtained the totally anonymous data from the city office. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine. In the present study, the data of 3,053 (61.1 %) subjects for whom complete sets of data were available were employed for statistical analysis. The questionnaire included the following items: age, sex, the status of public long-term care insurance certification (none, support-level, care-level), self-rated health (good, fair, poor, very poor), states of living (single living, with only spouse, with other family members), and the frequency of outside excursions per a week (every day, once in a few day, one a week, rarely). An individual was defined as being homebound if his or her frequency of outside excursions was less than once per week. he incidence of the homebound elderly in the elderly population over 65 years old was 14.4 % in the current study. The status of certification in public long-term care insurance was associated with being homebound. Self-rated health was significantly worse in homebound individuals than in those non-homebound. The current survey found 14.4 % of the elderly was home-bound in a large city in Japan.

Keywords: homebound; long-term care insurance; self-rated health.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The distribution of the frequency of excursions in the elderly over 65 years old. Approximately 14.4% of the elderly over 65 years old went out once a week or less.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The frequency of being homebound stratified by age and certified levels. As the age increased, the proportion of homebound individuals increased among the non-certified subjects.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Self-rated health of the elderly over 65 years old. The homebound rated their health significantly worse (p<0.001).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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