The primary factor responsible for the decline of flexibility with age is certain changes that occur in the connective tissues of the body. Interestingly, it has been suggested that exercise can delay the loss of flexibility due to the aging process of dehydration.
Full Answer
What percentage of flexibility is lost with age?
With age, we gradually lose the ability to move a joint through a full range of motion. By age 70, 25%-30% of overall flexibility is usually lost (in an average population).
Why is flexibility training important in older adults?
Any comprehensive exercise program should always be accompanied by flexibility training. With age, we gradually lose the ability to move a joint through a full range of motion. By age 70, 25%-30% of overall flexibility is usually lost (in an average population). Some joints are affected more than others.
What is the relationship between age and mobility decline?
In adult life, age-associated impairment of a number of homeostatic systems has been related to mobility decline (99). A complex multihormonal dysregulation characterized by an imbalance between catabolic and anabolic hormones occur with aging, which has important consequences for mobility and physical function (100).
What determines flexibility?
How flexible your muscles and joints are is partially determined by genetics and the way your joints are constructed. Ballerinas and gymnasts have greater flexibility than the average person, at least partially due to genetics. Age and gender are other factors that influence flexibility.
INTRODUCTION
Physical function is important as it relates to a person's ability to perform basic and instrumental activities of daily living (ADLs). Basic ADLs can be defined by tasks such as dressing, walking, standing up from a chair, going up and down stairs, bending, lifting, eating, stooping, carrying objects, grooming, and running.
METHODS
The procedures described herein were approved by the institutional review boards of Louisiana State University, the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, and Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
RESULTS
The 74 participants were comprised of 38 females (51.3%) and 36 males (48.7%) 90 years of age and older. The racial makeup of the participants was 71 Caucasian (95.9%) and 3 African American (4.1%). Table 1 provides descriptive statistics regarding age and anthropometric characteristics of the study sample.
DISCUSSION
The purposes of this investigation of community-dwelling nonagenarians were to describe age-related changes in physical function and HRQL and to examine the relationship between physical function and HRQL in this study sample.
CONCLUSIONS
These data suggest that upper body flexibility continues to decline during the 10th decade of life and that this has implications for decreased HRQL.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research was supported by the Louisiana Board of Regents through the Millennium Trust Health Excellence Fund [HEF (2001–06)-02], and by the National Institute of Aging 1-P01 AG022064-01.
REFERENCES
1. Aniansson A, Rundgren A, Sperling L. Evaluation of functional capacity in activities of daily living in 70-year-old men and women. Scand J Rehabil Med. 1980;12:145-154.
What are the factors that affect mobility?
The key aging phenotypes that underpin mobility and may act as compensatory mechanisms to promote peak performance and prevent mobility decline are body composition and strength, energetics, homeostatic (dys)regulation, and peripheral and central nervous system function (30). In general, we think about the continuous change in physiological variables that affect mobility as having a developmental growth phase, reaching a peak at some point in life, and then declining linearly or nonlinearly with aging. However, such an ideal trajectory is almost always perturbed by intervening health events, such as diseases and trauma, that may have both transient and long-term effects on the trajectory of function. For example, even an individual with robust mobility may lose the ability to walk because of a traumatic hip fracture while skiing. This individual will likely have full recovery although the healing process may affect the joint architecture and increase the chances of osteoarthritis later in life. Treatment for cancer may be successful but lead to accelerated aging (31). Chronic infections may be controlled by chronic activation of the immune system but result in reduced ability to build an effective inflammatory response when a new stimulus is presented. McEwen and Wingfield called this longer-term adverse effect of healing processes as type 2 chronic allostatic load (32).
How does muscle mass change with age?
During development, any addition of muscle mass is followed very tightly by a predictable increase in strength as the new muscle tissue has good biomechanical quality, that is, generates a normal amount of strength per unit of mass. Muscle mass and strength peak on average during the third decade of life followed by a slow decline that accelerates sometime between 60 and 70 years of age especially in men (56–58). With age, the correlation between dual energy X-ray absorptiometry measures of muscle mass and strength weakens, and considerable decline in strength may occur in the absence of any detectable decline in mass (59); although correlations may remain more stable if MRI-derived muscle mass is used (60). Aging is also associated with a progressive reduction of biomechanical muscle quality, which is usually operationalized as the ratio between strength and mass (61).
Why is resting metabolic rate so high?
Resting metabolic rate (RMR) normalized by body surface area or lean body mass is extremely high during the first year of life, between 50 and 60 cal/m2/h because of massive anabolic processes, especially protein synthesis that is energetically expensive (77). In childhood, RMR increases in parallel with increases in body mass due to linear growth, before reaching a plateau in adolescence (78), and then progressively declines across adulthood at least in part due to declines in fat free mass (79). Peak oxygen consumption declines with aging and the rate of decline accelerates at older ages, as shown from longitudinal symptom limited treadmill test data collected in the BLSA (80).
How is the health of older people assessed?
Recognizing that the health of older persons is best assessed through measures of physical and cognitive function rather than disease status is a major breakthrough in clinical and epidemiological research on aging over the last three decades (10). Slower walking speed (most commonly assessed using usual walking speed achieved during a timed walk test over a short distance) and other multisystem performance measures of physical function (such as the time taken to rise from a chair and sit down several times, or tests of balance) are consistently associated with poorer well-being and quality of life in old age, track overall health status, and predict adverse health outcomes, including rising multimorbidity, health care resource utilization, disability in activities of daily living, nursing home admission, and earlier mortality (11–16). Noteworthy, mobility disability is associated with mortality even in nonagenarians, a population where other risk factors lose their prognostic value (17). There is growing evidence that a faster rate of decline in walking speed is also associated with worse outcomes (18,19). Older people themselves value their mobility highly and they see its loss as a key disadvantage of aging (4).
Why is walking the first step important?
Retardation of walking “the first step” of even a few months is considered an indicator of developmental delay that requires medical attention and can be the first sign of neurological or musculoskeletal diseases (27). The signaling sequences, reflexes, integrative inputs, and force-generating tissues necessary to build an efficient gait pattern are already present at or soon after birth. However, these intrinsic tools are matched to environmental cues and available motor resources to build the most efficient gait pattern customized to every individual (28). Studies have shown that even in the presence of a severe impairment, such as low strength or localized neurological damage, there is considerable plasticity that allows residual resources to build a different but often similarly efficient gait pattern (29). Indeed, it is likely that such a high level of plasticity reflects the strong evolutionary advantage that bipedal stance provides to humans, which has led to the selection and conservation of a number of compensatory mechanisms aimed at minimizing the chance of losing the ability to walk. However, whether different developmental trajectories of mobility also affect mobility in late life as compensatory mechanisms become less effective remains an open question that could have substantial practical implications.
How does mobility affect quality of life?
Mobility is the most studied and most relevant physical ability affecting quality of life with strong prognostic value for disability and survival . Natural selection has built the “engine” of mobility with great robustness, redundancy, and functional reserve. Efficient patterns of mobility can be acquired during development even by children affected by severe impairments. Analogously, age-associated impairments in mobility-related physiological systems are compensated and overt limitations of mobility only occur when the severity can no longer be compensated. Mobility loss in older persons usually results from multiple impairments in the central nervous system, muscles, joints, and energetic and sensory physiological systems. Early preclinical changes in these physiological systems that precede mobility loss have been poorly studied. Peak performance, rate of decline, compensatory behaviors, or subclinical deterioration of physiological resources may cumulatively influence both timing of mobility loss and chances of recovery, but their role as risk factors has not been adequately characterized. Understanding the natural history of these early changes and intervening on them would likely be the most effective strategy to reduce the burden of disability in the population. For example, young women with low bone peak mass could be counseled to start strength resistance exercise to reduce their high risk of developing osteoporosis and fracture later in life. Expanding this approach to other physiological domains requires collecting and interpreting data from life course epidemiological studies, establishing normative measures of mobility, physical function, and physical activity, and connecting them with life course trajectories of the mobility-relevant physiological domains.
Why do we build on the analyses described above by describing the published evidence on changes that occur in mobility in old age?
In the following sections of this article, we build on the analyses described above by describing the published evidence on changes that occur in mobility in old age because that is where most knowledge lies, and then provide evidence that those changes are preannounced by changes that occur in midlife or even during development.
Why do people decline to participate in brain studies?
As with all studies of aging, selection bias is a challenge- many potential study participants decline enrollment because they are either too healthy (and busy) or too ill.2Additional ly, people with limited social or financial support and functional limitations may be less likely to enroll in studies.3This results in study findings that may not be generalizable to all older adults.
What are some examples of cognitive problems in older adults?
Memory. One of the most common cognitive complaints among older adults is change in memory.
Why are cognitive changes important?
These normal cognitive changes are important to understand because, first, they can affect an older adult’s day to day function and, second, they can help us distinguish normal from disease states. In this paper, we first describe the neurocognitive changes observed in normal aging.
Why are cross-sectional studies confounding?
Because results can be generated more quickly, most studies rely on cross-sectional design, comparing subjects from different age groups.4These studies, however, are subject to confounding due to cohort differences . A cohort that was born in the 1920’s had a very different life experience than a cohort born in the 1980’s. These cohorts may differ greatly in terms of culture, lifestyle, education, and requirements for success in life. Subjects from one age cohort may perform very poorly on any given cognitive or neurological test compared to subjects from a different age cohort irrespective of cognitive capacity, simply because of vastly different life experiences and skill sets.5Cohort differences can confound cross-sectional studies by potentially overestimating effects of aging.6
Is cognitive change a normal process of aging?
Cognitive change as a normal process of aging has been well documented in the scientific literature. Some cognitive abilities, such as vocabulary, are resilient to brain aging and may even improve with age. Other abilities, such as conceptual reasoning, memory, and processing speed, decline gradually over time. There is significant heterogeneity among older adults in the rate of decline in some abilities, such as measures of perceptual reasoning and processing speed.11We will provide a current, brief overview of the neuropsychology of normal cognitive aging. Interested readers are directed to other sources for a more comprehensive review of this topic.4,12