Aim: The present study clarified the relationship between elderly individuals providing nursing or caring for others, including their spouses, and their own health maintenance over three years.
Methods: Study participants were those who had completed the "Survey of Needs in the Spheres of Daily Life" distributed to all elderly individuals ≥65 years old in Nanto, Toyama Prefecture, Japan, in both 2014 and 2017. We evaluated data from 6,088 individuals after excluding those with insufficient data. Detailed responses were analyzed in order to understand the situation of the people to whom the respondents were providing nursing or care (e.g. spouses or others), the presence or absence of providing this nursing or care, and the relationship between these factors and the providers' health maintenance over a period of three years using multiple logistic regression analyses.
Results: Even after adjusting for critical variables, including basic attributes, overall health, and functional capacity in elderly men, among the subjects who had partners to whom they provided nursing or care, including a spouse, the number of individuals whose own health was maintained 3 years later was higher than among those who did not provide such nursing or care (odds ratio [OR], 1.67; P = 0.004). Furthermore, compared to women who did not provide nursing or care, the OR for women who did provide care for people others than their spouses was 1.44 (P = 0.045).
Conclusions: Our results suggest that providing nursing or caring for others (including a spouse for elderly men; excluding a spouse for elderly women) has a positive impact on health maintenance among the elderly.
Keywords: Care activities by the elderly; Elderly; Health maintenance; Mutual aid; Primary nursing care.