RESEARCH AGING : 90-Year-Olds Show Gains in Weight-Training Study
At an age when most of their contemporaries are worrying about simply keeping their blood pumping through their veins, 90-year-olds in a nursing home in Boston have been pumping iron.
The frail, institutionalized men and women have undertaken regular weight training to improve their strength and mobility and thereby reduce their susceptibility to injury in falls and accidents.
Some of the six women and four men in the original pilot program improved their strength threefold to fourfold over an eight-week period, and all except one who dropped out because of a previous hernia are “stronger than they had been many years previously,” physicians from Tufts University report today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
Two of the patients who walked with a cane at the beginning of the program can now manage without it, one can rise from a chair without using his arms for the first time in years, and five of them walk 50% faster. All are more mobile, have better balance and have suffered fewer falls since the training began, said geriatrician Maria A. Fiatarone of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston.
“The importance of this study is that it shows that, even at a very advanced age, physical frailty is treatable,” said Evan C. Hadley, chief of the geriatric branch at the National Institute on Aging. “This could greatly reduce the need for nursing home admissions by maintaining the mobility of older people and thus their ability to live independently.”
According to census figures, more than 3.5 million Americans are over the age of 85 and 1 million are over 90.
The study was so successful, Fiatarone said in a telephone interview, that the pilot trials have now been extended to about 30 additional people, one of whom is 100 years old, at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged, and the first subjects have been enrolled in a continuing weight-training program.
Encouraged by the positive results from this pilot study, the National Institute on Aging and the National Center for Nursing Research have awarded $2.9 million to the Hebrew Center and seven other institutions for further studies on this and other interventions for the elderly.
“The exciting results from this study really served as an impetus for developing the (Frailty and Injuries: Cooperative Studies of Intervention Techniques) research project,” Hadley said.
The 10 people in the original program ranged in age from 86 to 96, with an average of 90. They had an average of 4.5 chronic diseases and had been institutionalized for an average of 3.4 years. Eight had a history of falls and seven habitually used a cane or walker.
The subjects used a resistance training device. Sitting in a chair, they raised one leg at a time to lift a weight. At the beginning of the study, they could lift 17 pounds per leg on average. By the end, they could lift an average of 45 pounds.
That response, Fiatarone and her colleagues wrote, “is remarkable in light of their very advanced age, extremely sedentary habits, multiple chronic disease and functional disabilities and nutritional inadequacies.”
Fiatarone emphasized that, like younger people, the patients lost some of their gains if they stopped exercising. When the subjects were assessed four weeks after the end of the pilot test, they had lost 30% of the strength they gained. Most went back to exercising.
