Student Looks for Clues to Healthier Aging.
“How can we keep people out of nursing homes a little bit longer?” asks doctoral student Jennifer Lyons.
As part of her dissertation, Lyons recently led a study looking at walking speed as a way to predict long-term nursing home residence. The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, also controls for death as a competing risk, getting a clearer picture of the relationship between speed and independence.
The study found older women who were slower walkers were much more likely to live in a long-term care facility for at least one year. It also found that risk is somewhat overestimated when death isn’t adequately taken into account: Slower walkers also have a greater risk of dying without first entering a nursing home.
As the population ages, Lyons says, it is vital to find ways to intervene before someone loses their independence. “How can we identify people who are at risk for lengthy nursing home stays?” she asks. “And what can we do to make them healthier in order to delay or even prevent nursing home placement?”
At the same time, researchers in the aging field are still grappling with how to factor in the death of participants, Lyons says.
She and her co-authors say this may be the first study to bring together an objective measurement like walking speed, administrative claims data from Medicare, and statistically account for death in this way. “It’s really a rigorous and elegant way to analyze this association,” says Professor of Epidemiology Lisa Fredman, a co-author of the study.
Lyons and Fredman co-authored the study with Clinical Professor of Epidemiology Sherri Stuver, Professor of Biostatistics Timothy Heeren, and researchers from the University of Minnesota, the Veterans Affairs Health Care System, Health Partners, and the University of California San Francisco.
The walking speed data come from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), which since 1986 has tracked a cohort of 10,000 women aged 65 or older. Lyons had previously used data from an ancillary study to SOF, the Caregiver-SOF study, for her cumulative research project for her MPH.
“It’s been really terrific to see the way the SOF investigators have encouraged and welcomed Jenn to work on the data,” says Fredman, who began working with SOF in 1997. “They definitely give a lot of encouragement and take a great deal of interest in the next generation of researchers.”
“I get to be a part of SOF when so much of the hard work of running a study is already done, so I can focus on the fun parts like analyzing the data,” Lyons says.
“I feel very privileged to be part of a study that people have been working hard on for so many years, and lucky that I can try to put some of the pieces together to tell a story.”