Physical activity and quality of life in persons with visual impairment: an observational study

Abstract

AIMS: Little evidence demonstrates the influence of physical activity habits on the quality of life of people with visual impairment (VI). To gain a broader understanding, this study attempted to verify the relation between the habits of physical activity and quality of life in people with VI.METHODS: The sample consisted of 53 visually impaired volunteers. The Clinical and Sociodemographic Assessment Sheet, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire short version and the Quality of Life Assessment Instrument (WHOQOL-Bref) were used.RESULTS: The mean age was 42.39±2.10 years, with a predominance of males and the mean Body Mass Index was 27.55±0.76. Predominant physical activity levels were between moderate to high. Males presented significantly higher levels of vigorous physical activity (p=0.033) and higher scores in WHOQOL-Bref, when compared to the female sex.CONCLUSION: The higher the physical activity levels of this population with VI, the better the quality of life. The participants had a predominance of moderate to high physical activity, as well as, the male presented higher levels of physical activity, when compared with the female in vigorous activities.

Physical Activity and Quality of Life in People With Visual Impairments: A Systematic Review

“…Table 1 shows the descriptive characteristics of the included studies. Four studies were conducted in United States (Crews, Chou, Zhang, Zack, & Saaddine, 2014;Haegele, Famelia, & Lee, 2017;Haegele & Zhu, 2019;Holbrook, Caputo, Fuller, Perry, & Morgan, 2008), one in Poland (Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015), one in Germany (Schliermann, Heydenreich, Bungter, & Anneken, 2017), and one in Brazil (Soares et al, 2019). All studies were cross-sectional.…”

“…All studies were cross-sectional. Four studies had samples of fewer than 100 participants (Haegele et al, 2017;Holbrook et al, 2008;Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015;Soares et al, 2019), and one included only men (Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015).…”

“…The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) was used to asses physical activity in five studies (Haegele et al, 2017;Haegele & Zhu, 2019;Inoue et al, 2018;Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015;Soares et al, 2019), two studies used a yes/no question to define whether the participants were physically active or inactive (Crews et al, 2014;Schliermann et al, 2017), and one study used step activity monitors (Holbrook et al, 2008). Regarding QOL assessment, three studies used the WHOQoL brief version (Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015;Schliermann et al, 2017;Soares et al, 2019), one used the WHOQoL Rasch-revised version (Haegele et al, 2017), one used SF-12 (Haegele & Zhu, 2019), one used the Visual Function Questionnaire (VFQ-25) (Inoue et al, 2018), one used the Low Vision Quality of Life Questionnaire (LVQoL) (Holbrook et al, 2008), and one used questions derived from the SF-36 (Crews et al, 2014).…”

“…Two studies defined visual impairment by visual acuity: ≤ 0.6, and between 0.05 and 0.3 (Inoue et al, 2018;Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015). One study did not provide a definition of visual impairment (Soares et al, 2019).…”

“…Overall, a positive relationship between physical activity and QOL was observed in six studies (Crews et al, 2014;Haegele et al, 2017;Haegele & Zhu, 2019;Inoue et al, 2018;Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015;Soares et al, 2019). Three studies reported a positive effect of physical activity on specific domains of QOL, such as life satisfaction and embarrassment when doing things (Kamelska & Mazurek, 2015), activity limitation and fair or poor health (Crews et al, 2014), as well as physical and psychological health (Haegele & Zhu, 2019).…”