Scoping review of health promotion and disease prevention interventions addressed to elderly people

Abstract

Background: The ageing of modern societies remains one of the greatest challenges for health and social systems. To respond to this challenge, we need effective strategies assuring healthy active life for elderly people. Health promotion and related activities are perceived as a key intervention, which can improve wellbeing in later life. The main aim of this study is the identification and classification of such interventions addressed to older adults and elderly. Therefore, the strategy based on the scoping review as a feasible tool for exploring this domain, summarizing research findings and identifying gaps of evidence, was applied.

Methods: The scoping review relies on the analysis of previous reviews of interventions aimed at older adults (55-64 years old) and elderly persons (65 years and above) assessed for their effectiveness in the framework of a systematic review and/or meta-analysis. The search strategy was based on the identification of interventions reported as health promotion, primary disease prevention, screening or social support. In the analysis, the reviews published from January 2000 to April 2015 were included.

Results: The search strategy yielded 334 systematic reviews and/or meta-analyses addressed to target groups of interest, 182 of them assessed interventions belonging to health promotion, 219 to primary prevention, 34 to screening and 35 to social support. The studies focused on elderly (65 years and above) made up 40.4 % of all retrieved reviews and those addressing population of 55 years and above accounted for 24.0 %.

Conclusions: Interventions focused on health maintenance and improvement in elderly and older adults represent frequently combined health promotion and disease prevention actions. Many interventions of this type are not addressed exclusively to elderly populations and/or older adults but are designed for the general population. The most common types of interventions addressed to elderly and older adults in the area of health promotion include health education, behavior modification and health communication.

Keywords: Elderly; Health promotion; Older adults; Primary disease prevention; Scoping review; Screening; Social support; Systematic review.

Fig. 1

Flow diagram of the search strategy and study selection process

Fig. 2

Numbers of systematic reviews retrieved in consecutive years between 2000 and 2014 according to the general area of intervention

Fig. 3

Numbers of systematic reviews retrieved classified by specific target areas of interventions

Fig. 4

Numbers of systematic reviews retrieved analyzing health promotion interventions classified according to the McKenzie et al. taxonomy