Relationship Quality of Life, Body Mass Index and Muscle Strength in Elderly

Abstract

During the human aging process, changes occur that can interfere with people's quality of life. Some of these changes can be identified by body mass index and handgrip strength, and can be related to quality of life. In this sense, the objective was to discriminate, through sensitivity and specificity curves, the cutoff points of the body mass index and handgrip strength as predictors of quality of life in elderly people living in the urban area of a small municipality. Epidemiological and cross-sectional study, approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the State University of Southwest Bahia. The data were analyzed by receiver-operating characteristic curves in the statistical package for social sciences, and cut-off points discriminated by the Youden method. Data on quality of life were collected through questionnaire, body mass index by anthropometric measurements, and grip strength was evaluated by a dynamometer. 264 elderly people were identified, with mean age and handgrip strength of 71.85 years (SD±7.73) and 9.99 kgf, (SD±13.01), respectively. The cut-off points predictive of the outcome, for men and women, were <22.8 kg/m² (CI: 95%=0.37- 0.72) for the body mass index, and <13 kgf 0.379 (CI: 95%=0.32-0.43) for handgrip strength. It is concluded that the cutoff points have a good ability to predict high quality of life for the elderly evaluated, among which the body mass index had greater predictive capacity.