A Short Walk a Day Shortens the Hospital Stay: Physical Activity and the Demand for Hospital Services for Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: To estimate the impact of increased physical activity on utilization of hospital services among older adults in Canada.Methods: The paper uses the Canadian Community Health Survey Cycle 2.1, and count data regression models. The study sample includes 18,196 adults aged 65 and above. Specification tests are used in order to identify the appropriate count data model, and sensitivity analyses are conducted to check the robustness of the results.Results: The paper shows that physical activity is negatively associated with the probability of staying in the hospital as well as the numbers of hospital stay among users. However, the potential gain decreases as current activity level increases. The results also imply that an additional 20-minute daily walk by inactive older Canadians would decrease total hospital stays by about 2% of the total annual inpatient days. This is equivalent to 1.2% of total hospital bed capacity in a given year.Conclusions: Health promotion efforts to increase the level of activity among older adults may create significant savings for the health care system. The total potential gain from additional physical activity is substantial, especially for those who are inactive. However, these gains can be materialized if people stay active enough to derive positive health benefits of physical activity. These results, therefore, should be evaluated in the light of findings from related literature on health and physical activity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".