Doctoral thesis pooling homecare data from six countries links moderate-to-higher physical activity to better function, health outcomes and mortality in older homecare recipients
This doctoral thesis, conducted within the EU-funded I-CARE4OLD project, first maps the definition and use of non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs)—a systematic review shows highly heterogeneous and predominantly negatively framed definitions, and data from six countries show underuse of interventions with proven benefits (physical therapy, occupational therapy, psychosocial interventions, social participation) alongside relatively frequent use of physical restraints in some countries—and second, using longitudinal real-world data from the Netherlands and Ontario, Canada, with propensity-based methods, generalized estimating equations, and target trial emulation with causal machine learning, finds that moderate and higher levels of physical activity are associated with beneficial effect