Older men who engage in more house work might have better health

Older man engaging in house work outside his house

Older men who engage in more house work might have better health, this was discovered in an investigation designed to understand how adults spend their time in later life and how some kinds of every day activities affect their health.

 According to the study carried out by Nicolas Adjei and Tilman Brand of Bremen university Germany, house hold activity have become the main "Productive work"  for older adults after retirement but added that not much is known about how these activities affect health.

"The percentage of those aged 65 years and above," explains study co-leader Adjei", is increasing globally due to higher life expectancy. It is important to understand how older adults spend their time in these later years and the possible positive and negative implications on their well being.

The research examined weather the duration of sleep in adults influence the way house hold activity impact the health of both men and women respectively, stressing that sleep is one of the most important factor that determines health.

According to the report on BMC Public Health blog,"Pool data obtained from Multinational time Use Study (MTUS) from 15,333 men and 20,907 women from Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, France, the Netherlands and the US were analyzed. Multiple binary logistic regression models were used to examine the associations between three broad categories of housework activities ((1) cooking, cleaning and shopping, (2) gardening and maintenance; (3) childcare) and health. We further investigated the extent to which total housework hours and sleep duration were associated with self-reported health for men and women separately".

The result showed that elderly people who spent more than 3 to 6 h/day on house work had higher odds of reporting good health among men while those who spent less than 7 hours daily, with more than 8 hours of sleep  were negatively affected.