With the aging of the baby boomer population and their accompanying burden of disease, future disability rates are expected to increase. This paper summarizes the state of the evidence regarding physical activity and aging for individuals with mobility disability and proposes a healthy aging research agenda for this population. Using a previously published framework, we present evidence in orde...

This study identified profiles of functional disability (FD) paralleled by increasing levels of disability. We assessed 96 subjects using the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II). Clustering Based on Rules (ClBR) (a hybrid technique of Statistics and Artificial Intelligence) was used in the analysis. Four groups of subjects with different profiles of FD were o...

PURPOSE To assess the validity of dimensions of disability in the Episodic Disability Framework, a conceptual framework derived from the perspective of adults living with HIV. METHODS We conducted confirmatory factor analyses with 913 adults living with HIV in an observational cohort study called the Ontario HIV Treatment Network Cohort Study (OCS). We tested hypotheses that dimensions of dis...

People acquire physical disabilities through aging and a multitude of mishaps, diseases, and infections. Although clinicians have offered many different explanations for the diverse psychological reactions that occur in the wake of physical disabilities, few have applied scientific tools to study these behaviors, and fewer still have presented heuristic and testable theoretical explanations. Mo...

Despite 50 years of pharmacological and psychosocial interventions, schizophrenia remains one of the leading causes of disability. Schizophrenia is also a life-shortening illness, caused mainly by poor physical health and its complications. The end result is a considerably reduced lifespan that is marred by reduced levels of independence, with few novel treatment options available. Disability i...

For most sports and a majority of ablebodied athletes, there are seven stages of LTAD from Active Start through to Training to Win, plus Active for Life, as illustrated in Figure 1. The ages shown are appropriate for athletes with congenital disabilities, but do not apply to individuals with acquired disabilities. Those who acquire disabilities still need to make an Active Start and should lear...

This paper provides an overview of strategies that have been used to promote physical activity in individuals with intellectual disability. Several different approaches are discussed and the strengths and limitations of each are presented. Some determinants of physical activity for individuals with intellectual disability are also reported in an effort to better understand the factors that infl...

BACKGROUND Merrill et al. (1996) reported that persons with intellectual disability (ID) were slower at learning a visual search task to automaticity relative to persons of the same age without ID. For persons without ID, automaticity develops most rapidly under conditions in which a response is always the same for a particular stimulus. This study was designed to investigate whether persons wi...

Fear-avoidance beliefs have been identified as an important psychosocial variable in patients with chronic disability doe to low back pain. The importance of fear-avoidance beliefs for individuals with acute low back pain has not been explored. Seventy-eight subjects with workrelated low back pain of less than 3 weeks’duration were studied. Measurements of pain intensity, physical impairment, d...