Functional ability on selected activities of daily living among healthy older community-dwelling adults in southeast Nigeria

Background: With ageing, functional health and physical performances decline, thus restricting an elderly person’s ability from successfully carrying out the normal activities of daily living.
Aim: To determine the functional ability on selected activities of daily living among healthy older community-dwelling adults in Southeast Nigeria and to verify the null hypotheses of no significant difference on ADL with selected socio-demographic variables.
Methods and Materials: The descriptive survey research method was adopted. A total of 91 healthy older community-dwelling adults were conveniently sampled for the study. Observation, interview method and questionnaire were used for data collection. The descriptive statistic was used to analyze the data. All the analyses were done using SPSS version 18.
Results: The result showed that the functional ability on selected activities of daily living among healthy older community-dwelling adults in Southeast Nigeria is high. Statistically, the study revealed significant differences between the variables of the respondents on the selected activities of daily living.
Conclusion: The healthy older community-dwelling adults in Southeast Nigeria have high functional ability on the selected activities of daily living. This satisfactory finding indicates that majority of the older adults are functionally independent in relation to activities of daily living.