Adaptações musculares e funcionais e sua correlação com aspectos psicossociais em idosos hipertensos: resultados do Estudo HAEL

Abstract

Some physiological declines are observed throughout the aging process and added to physical inactivity may cause impairments in strength and muscle power, generating inability to perform activities of daily living, decreasing the independence of older individuals. In addition to physical impairments, the aging process increases the risk of developing hypertension and is also associated with the presence of epressive symptoms. All of these factors added to uncontrolled risk factors may negatively affect the quality of life of older hypertensive individuals. In addition, declines in physical outcomes may be associated with declines in psychosocial aspects. Thus, the present dissertation aimed to verify physical and psychosocial adaptations to a combined training program, as well as to correlate the adaptations between physical outcomes and the psychosocial aspects in older hypertensive individuals, in comparison to a health education control group. For this purpose, two manuscripts were produced with data from the multicenter randomized clinical trial "Hypertension Approaches in the Elderly: a Lifestyle study" (HAEL), comprising only the database of participants in the intervention center of the city of Pelotas, RS - Brazil. The first study verified the morphological, functional and psychosocial adaptations before and after 12 weeks of combined training in older hypertensive subjects. As the main finding, better muscle quality was found in the vastus medialis muscle and gains in the performance of the 6-minute walk test after 12 weeks of combined training intervention compared to the health education control group. In the second study, in which correlations were performed between physical (muscle quality, muscle thickness and functionality) and psychosocial outcomes (quality of life and depressive symptoms), the main findings were significant associations between depressive symptoms and quadriceps muscle quality and between the vitality domain of quality of life and lower limb functionality for the combined training group. The that is, without using specific machinery, using only body weight and elastic bands resistance, was efficient to promote morphological, functional and psychosocial adaptations in older hypertensive individuals. In addition, significant associations were observed between physical and psychosocial outcomes of older hypertensive individuals after 12 weeks of a pragmatic combined training intervention.