The COVID Pandemic Worsened Physical Activity Disproportionately in Frailer Adults: A Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Frailty is associated with increased hospitalization and mortality and may be exacerbated with physical inactivity. The COVID-19 pandemic has heterogeneously impacted peoples' physical activity level, but the impact on the frail population is unclear. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to test the hypothesis that higher frailty levels were associated with worse changes in physical activity, ability to move around the home, and do housework during the pandemic. METHODS: We included 23,303 Canadians (age: 69.1 ± 9.5 years, 53% females) who participated in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging COVID-19 Questionnaire study. Frailty prior to the pandemic (follow-up 1: 2015-2018) was measured via 52-item frailty index and grouped into 0.00-0.05, 0.05-0.10, 0.10-0.20, and >0.20 scores. Participants were asked whether they changed their levels of physical activity, ability to move at home, and ability to do housework during the pandemic. RESULTS: The average frailty level was 0.09 ± 0.06. Compared with the lowest frailty group, participants with frailty levels >0.20 reported worse physical activity (17% vs. 45%), worse ability to move at home (3% vs. 26%), and perform housework (3% vs. 27%). Covariate-adjusted logistic regression models demonstrated that higher frailty level was associated with a greater odds of reporting worse physical activity (reference: 0.00-0.05; odds ratio for frailty index >0.20:4.03, 95% confidence interval [3.33, 4.87]), worse ability to move in home (odds ratio = 11.16, 95% confidence interval [8.28, 15.03]), and worse ability doing housework (odds ratio = 12.58, 95% confidence interval [9.24, 17.13]). CONCLUSIONS: The adverse changes in physical activity levels and ability to move at home among frail older adults during the pandemic document the need for strategies to help vulnerable populations move more.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".