Yes / It has been argued that transition points in life, such as the approach towards, and early years of retirement present
key opportunities for interventions to improve the health of the population. Research has also highlighted inequalities
in health status in the retired population and in response to interventions which should be addressed. We aimed to
conduct a systematic review to synthesise international evidence on the types and effectiveness of interventions to
increase physical activity among people around the time of retirement. A systematic review of literature was carried
out between February 2014 and April 2015. Searches were not limited by language or location, but were restricted by
date to studies published from 1990 onwards. Methods for identification of relevant studies included electronic database
searching, reference list checking, and citation searching. Systematic search of the literature identified 104 papers which
described study populations as being older adults. However, we found only one paper which specifically referred to their
participants as being around the time of retirement. The intervention approaches for older adults encompassed: training
of health care professionals; counselling and advice giving; group sessions; individual training sessions; in-home exercise
programmes; in-home computer-delivered programmes; in-home telephone support; in-home diet and exercise
programmes; and community-wide initiatives. The majority of papers reported some intervention effect, with evidence
of positive outcomes for all types of programmes. A wide range of different measures were used to evaluate
effectiveness, many were self-reported and few studies included evaluation of sedentary time. While the retirement
transition is considered a significant point of life change, little research has been conducted to assess whether physical
activity interventions at this time may be effective in promoting or maintaining activity, or reducing health inequalities.
We were unable to find any evidence that the transition to retirement period was, or was not a significant point for
intervention. Studies in older adults more generally indicated that a range of interventions might be effective for
people around retirement age. / This work was funded by the National Institute for Health Research as part of the Public Health Research Programme, (grant number 12/133/20).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/11035 |
| Date | 26 January 2016 |
| Creators | Baxter, S., Johnson, M., Payne, N., Buckley-Woods, H., Blank, L., Hock, E., Daley, A., Taylor, A., Pavey, T., Mountain, Gail, Goyder, E.C. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © 2016 Baxter et al. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
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