19% of older adults do not make at least one annual medical consultation and seven out of ten -five million Argentines over 60 years old- do not engage in physical activity at least once a week, according to a joint study by the Argentine Social Debt Observatory of the Argentine Catholic University (ODSA-UCA) and the Navarro Viola Foundation.
“The medical consultation deficit has to do with accessibility to care in health centers, which have had restrictions during the pandemic that have not yet been normalized, both in the private and public sectors,” Solange Rodríguez Espínola told Télam. , researcher at the UCA and one of the authors of the report “Living conditions of the elderly (2017-2021). Vulnerabilities in the key of the COVID-19 pandemic”.
In this sense, he pointed out that “for this generational group, health care has had a greater delay in fully putting its services into operation”, with the consequence of “postponed and diminished attention”.
However, the survey shows that The proportion of people over 60 years of age who do not comply with the recommendation to make at least one visit to the doctor every 12 months is lower than that registered among those under 60, where the absence of annual control reaches 25%.
“Between 2017 and 2019, the approximate value of older people who did not attend an annual medical consultation was only 8%, a value that increased markedly in 2020, reaching 42%; but that deficit in consultation began to shrink in 2021, when 28% is reported “said.
Among the under 60s, on the other hand, the percentage of the population that did not go to the doctor even once in an entire year increased from 17 to 37.7% between 2019 and 2020, but remained the same high in 2021.
Secondly, The survey reveals that this way of neglecting one’s health is more frequent among men -20% against 18%-, among people with a lower educational level – 22% of those who did not finish high school and 14% of those who concluded it – and those with a lower socioeconomic level -22% of those who belong to the “very low” socioeconomic stratum and 13% of those who are in the upper middle class.-.
Regarding the deficit of physical activity in terms of the WHO, that is, “any bodily movement produced by the skeletal muscles that requires energy expenditure” including instances of play, work, displacement, domestic tasks and recreational activities; 73% of older adults do not do any physical activity at least once a week.
“The deficit of physical activity in older adults, which since 2017 had remained around 70%, amounts to almost 80% in 2020, which is explained because going outside was what was most conditioned during isolation, there was no availability to go to a gym or other spaces for movement while teleworking was expanded (among those who carried out productive activities) ”, explained Rodríguez Espínola.
It is worth clarifying that We are not talking here about “physical exercise”, which refers to a higher scale, that is, exclusively to that physical activity that is “planned, structured, repetitive and related to an objective linked to the improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness.
The study shows that the deficit of physical activity is also high in people under 60, but it increases by 12 percentage points among those who passed that age limit and that lack is more pronounced again among people who did not finish high school (83% versus 63), among those who belong to the lowest socioeconomic stratum (86% versus 56% of the ‘middle-high’ stratum) or live in the suburbs of Buenos Aires (79% versus 55% of the CABA).
“A deficit equivalent to that of the population under 60 should be interpreted as a more critical deficit, with greater consequences for a life with adequate health. And according to the results presented, the deficit is not equivalent, but is greater among older people”, states the study.
This deficit reaches “almost 5 million older people (who) should incorporate physical exercise into their weekly routine.”
On the other hand, under the challenge of the pandemic, two out of ten older people worsened their health in 2020, compared to the moment before Covid 19, (mostly in men, in professional middle strata, from CABA and in multi-person households) but In 2021, the percentage of those whose health status has improved increases compared to the previous period (22% versus 15%), especially in the non-poor, in CABA.
Older people who persisted in their health problems between 2019 and 2021, present greater social and economic vulnerability. In addition, about 6 out of 10 older people who live alone have health problems, compared to those who live with others.
As for the “personal project deficit” that measures “the ability to think about projects beyond the day to day, the ability to project oneself”, the incidence is much higher in those older than 60 years (22%) than in the 18-59 age group (14%).
The report also shows that for the period 2017-2021 the feeling of feeling “little or not happy at all” is slightly more frequent among those over 60 (15% against 13%).
However, Rodríguez Espínola explains that, if 2020 is compared with 2021, it is evident that “unhappiness in older people increases, reaching almost 18%” in the second year of the pandemic, after having paradoxically decreased in 2020.
“The pandemic caused a restructuring of needs and values, being alive and healthy in 2020 was everything, even above not having a job or having something to eat. It was a period where it was evaluated how important the affections were, being in contact with the networks”said.
The sample of the Argentine Social Debt Survey is made up of 5,760 households per year belonging to urban conglomerates of 80,000 inhabitants or more throughout the country, within which the population aged 18 or over is surveyed, including some 1,300 over 60 years per year.
