Seniors who expect their health to decline as they grow older are less likely to participate in regular physical activity, research suggests.

"Having low expectations for aging may be a barrier for older adults that holds them back from being more physically active," study author Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, of the University of California at Los Angeles stated.

Studies have shown that less than four in 10 adults aged 65 years and older participate in routine exercise. It is also known that many older adults attribute their health problems to old age rather than illness and those that do are less likely to seek health care for those problems. Sarkisian and her colleagues hypothesized that older adults who expect to have increasing health problems and otherwise have low expectations about aging would also be less likely to keep themselves physically active.

To investigate, they surveyed 636 seniors, aged 65 years and older, who attended 14 community-based senior centers in the Los Angeles area. In addition to asking the seniors about their aging expectations, they also asked them to estimate how many minutes they had spent walking for exercise, swimming, bicycling or engaging in any other type of aerobic exercise during the previous week.

Nearly 40 percent of the seniors said they had engaged in less than a half-hour of such moderate or vigorous physical activity, including 20 percent who reported having participated in no physical activity during the previous seven days.

Older adults with lower expectations about aging, who expected to experience more health-related decline as they grew older, were more likely to report spending less time engaging in physical activity than those with higher age expectations, the investigators report in this month's Journal of General Internal Medicine.

What's more, seniors with the lowest scores on the Expectations Regarding Aging Survey were more than twice as likely as those with the highest age-expectations to report participating in less than 30 minutes of physical activity in the previous week.

In particular, those with low expectations in the categories of general health, functional independence, pain, fatigue and appearance, respectively, were likely to report low levels of physical activity, the report indicates.

Yet, all five of these categories "represent domains that can improve with physical activity," the researchers note.

Sarkisian and her team caution that the current findings may apply only to the most sedentary older adults. Further, they write, it is not known whether participation in physical activity causes older adults to have higher age expectations or whether an inactive lifestyle causes seniors to lower their age expectations.

People do experience physical changes as they grow older, Sarkisian noted, adding, "even world-record marathoners slow down in old age."

"Our study does not conclude that no one should expect any changes with aging, but rather that if seniors hold expectations that are too low, this might cause them to miss out on the important health benefits of regular physical activity," she stated. "Based on our findings I would encourage older adults never to use 'old age' as an excuse for not exercising," she added.

SOURCE: Journal of General Internal Medicine, October 2005.