According foxnews.com, there is a study that shows better health behaviors and the use more preventive care when healthy elderly people were asked to fill out health risk questionnaires and got personalized counseling.
Lead author Andreas E. Stuck of University Hospital Bern in Switzerland said that eighteen percent of the study asks working-age employees to complete health risk assessments, but the use of these tools in older people is relatively new. He added that the personal health risk assessments covered multiple potential risk factors relevant in old age and participants received personalized feedback and health counseling that's good for two years.
Stuck told Reuters Health by email that prevention in old age is likely effective, but only if risk assessment is combined with personalized counseling for an extended period of time.
His team conducted the study in Switzerland between 2000 and 2002. They got 874 healthy adults over age 65 to fill out questionnaires and receive individualized computer-generated feedback reports that were sent to the doctors right after. For two years, nurse counselors visited patients at home and called them every three to six months to give support the health behaviors they should be doing or preventive care they should be getting based on their individual reports.
Two years after, the team compared the risk assessment group to another 1,000 similar adults who did not answer the questionnaires or got counseling. Seventy percent of those who completed the health-risk assessments were physically active and 66 percent had received a seasonal flu vaccine, compared to 62 percent and 59 percent of the comparison group, respectively.
Long-term effects like nursing home admission was not available, but they estimated that almost 78 percent of the adults in the health risk assessment group were still alive after eight years, compared to almost 73 percent in the comparison group. Stuck said that health assessment data entry and personalized feedback report takes each patient about an hour to do and would cost about $30. This doesn't include the cost of individual counseling by a nurse counselor or a primary care physician. He added that health risk assessment should be offered to all older people starting between age 60 and 65.
