Introduction: Physical activity helps diabetic older adults who have physical impairments or comorbid conditions to control their disease. To enable state planners to select physical activity programs for these adults, we calculated synthetic state-specific estimates of inactive older adults with diabetes, categorized by defined health status groups.
Methods: Using data from the 2000 through 2009 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we calculated synthetic state-specific estimates of inactive adults with diabetes who were aged 50 years or older for 5 mutually exclusive health status groups: 1) homebound, 2) frail (functional difficulty in walking one-fourth mile, climbing 10 steps, standing for 2 hours, and stooping, bending, and kneeling), 3) functionally impaired (difficulty in 1 to 3 of these functions), 4) having 1 or more comorbid conditions (with no functional impairments), and 5) healthy (no impairments or comorbid conditions). We combined NHIS regional proportions for the health status groups of inactive, older diabetic adults with BRFSS data of older diabetic adults to estimate state-specific proportions and totals.
Results: State-specific estimates of health status groups among all older adults ranged from 2.2% to 3.0% for homebound, 5.8% to 8.8% for frail, 20.1% to 26.1% for impaired, 34.9% to 43.7% for having comorbid conditions, and 4.0% to 6.9% for healthy; the remainder were older active diabetic adults. Except for the homebound, the percentages in these health status groups varied significantly by region and state.
Conclusion: These state-specific estimates correspond to existing physical activity programs to match certain health status characteristics of groups and may be useful to program planners to meet the needs of inactive, older diabetic adults.