Força de preensão manual e funcionalidade entre idosas fisicamente ativas e insuficientemente ativas

Muscular strength is an important indicator of global health and functionality in health care for the elderly. To maintenance of the functional capacity of elderly, the practice of regular physical activity is gaining prominence. The purpose of the study was to investigate handgrip strength in the elderly, analyze functionality and compare the performance of physical activity between physically active and non-active elderly. The aim of the study was to compare hand grip strength and functionality between physically active and insufficiently active older women. The study is a cross-sectional descriptive study with no therapeutic intervention. The sample consisted in 30 elderly women, age ≥ 60 years. Height, weight and BMI were measured; in addition, we used the IPAQ questionnaire, Lawton and Katz scale and Hand Grip strength. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to analyze the normality of the data and the Student t test for independent samples was used to compare the performance between the subjects. The results demonstrate that there is no significant difference between the Handgrip Strength between active and insufficiently active elderly people, the same could be observed for Lawton's Scale and for anthropometric data, only the Katz Index showed a significant difference between groups. We concluded that the handgrip strength, as well as anthropometrics parameters aren’t influenced by the lifestyle in the elderly.