Quantifying relationship between health status and physical fitness in middle-aged and elderly people

This study clarified the physical fitness components that contribute to improving and maintaining health status with aging and each age grade and quantified the degree of relationship between health status and physical fitness in middle-aged and elderly males and females. The participants were divided into healthy and unhealthy groups according to health status. Discriminant analysis was applied to the multivariate data. Correct discriminant probabilities of discriminant functions to discriminate the healthy and unhealthy groups were about 70%. This suggests that there is a relatively high relationship between health status and physical fitness level for middle-aged and elderly males and females. The contribution of each physical fitness component to health status was evaluated by calculating Pearson's correlation coefficients between the discriminant score and the performance in each physical fitness test after expressing each individual's degree of health with the discriminant score. The aging change for the contribution of each physical fitness component to health status from 30 to 69 years old was classified into patterns from the contribution. This study may be useful as objective data to prepare an exercise program considering the contribution of the physical fitness component of health status.