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Introduction: Overweight and obesity are rising in older people and in older women, the incidence of obesity is higher than in men.The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of obesity and overweight in the elderly women residing in Shiraz's elderly homes and its relationship with physical activity.
Method: 186 elderly women residing in Shiraz nursing homes (2016) voluntarily participated in this descriptive - analytic study, which is a correlation type. First, we measured height and weight of subjects (for calculate BMI) and also measured Waist and hip circumference (for calculate abdominal obesity). Physical activity international questionnaire was used to assess the physical fitness status. To analyze the data we used of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient test, Kruskal-Wallis test, U-Mann Whitney test and SPSS/16 (α= 0.05).
Results: The results showed that in elderly women of Shiraz nursing homes, the prevalence of general obesity was 23.7%, the prevalence of overweight was 57.5% and 18.8% had normal body mass index. Also, 87.6% of women had abdominal obesity and 12.4% had normal condition. There was a significant reverse relationship between physical activity and BMI (p = 0.001, r = -0.36) and between physical activity and abdominal obesity (p = 0.04, r = -0.86).
Conclusion: Regarding the relatively high prevalence of overweight and obesity in elderly women and its reverse relationship with the amount of physical activity, it can be concluded that the amount of physical activity in the elderly can affect on the general and abdominal obesity. Therefore, according to the specific conditions of the elderly, physical activity can be increased in order to prevent and reduce the amount of obesity and overweight.