Canadian women report poorer quality of life than men as they age
StatsCan study involves 7,915 Canadians over age 40
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 | 1:37 PM ET
CBC News
The quality of life of Canadian men and women differs as they age, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday.
The agency followed 7,915 Canadians over age 40 for 10 years. Participants were asked to answer questions about their quality of life every two years from 1994 to 2004.
'It's always interesting when you start to analyze men and women separately.'— Heather Orpana, researcher
Health-related quality of life is defined as overall health status — such as the ability to see, hear, feel pain, and whether there are any emotional problems or mobility issues — and how it affects them daily.
"In summary, Canadians are, on average, quite healthy as they age from mid to later life," the study's authors concluded.
But at age 65, more women than men said they had more than one chronic condition and women were more likely to need help with activities of daily living, Heather Orpana, a senior researcher at Statistics Canada, and her colleagues found.
"We were interested in this result because men didn't show a similar important decline in that early decade," said Orpana, also an adjunct professor in health psychology at the University of Ottawa.
This study did not look at why, but followup research is exploring whether physical activity levels, life stress, social support or access to health care make a difference.
The results should be published later this year.
"It's always interesting when you start to analyze men and women separately," said Orpana. "Quite often you do find important differences that you could not have anticipated."
While the researchers were not expecting to find a difference between the two genders, women tend to report more health conditions than men, she noted.
The study was the first national, longitudinal look at aging among average Canadians, the researchers said.
Institutions considered
The study was unique in that researchers followed people as they moved from households to institutions.
"[T]his study demonstrates that excluding data for institutionalized individuals presents a biased view of the aging process, as does the failure to take mortality into account when describing the health of the population," the report's authors wrote.
Including the institutionalized elderly gives a less optimistic but more accurate estimate of population health, the researchers said.
The researchers took the results and rolled them up into a single score, from perfect health-related quality of life, to worse than death — a measure that applied to a combination of factors, such as being unable to hear and walk while suffering pain.
One of the report's authors owns the health index used in the study, but the company was not paid for its use in the study.
