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Abstract
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PURPOSE: Community-level group participation is a structural aspect of social capital that may have a contextual influence on an individual's health. Herein, we sought to investigate a contextual relationship between community-level prevalence of sports group participation and depressive symptoms in older individuals.
METHODS: We used data from the 2010 Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES), a population-based, cross-sectional study of individuals aged ≥65 years without long-term care needs in Japan. Overall, 74,681 participants in 516 communities were analyzed. Depressive symptoms were diagnosed as the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale score ≥5. Participation in a sports group 1 day/month or more often was defined as "participation." For this study, we applied two-level multilevel Poisson regression analysis stratified by sex, calculated prevalence ratios (PRs), and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).
RESULTS: Overall, 17,420 individuals (23.3%) had depressive symptoms, and 16,915 (22.6%) participated in a sports group. Higher prevalence of community-level sports group participation had a statistically significant relationship with a lower likelihood of depressive symptoms (male, PR: 0.89, 95% CI: 0.85-0.92; female, PR: 0.96, 95% CI: 0.92-0.99, estimated by 10% of participation proportion) after adjusting for individual-level sports group participation, age, diseases, family form, alcohol, smoking, education, equivalent income, and population density. We found statistically significant cross-level interaction terms in males only (PR: 0.86, 95% CI: 0.77-0.95).
CONCLUSION: We found a contextual preventive relationship between community-level sports group participation and depressive symptoms in older individuals. Therefore, promoting sports groups in a community may be effective as a population-based strategy for the prevention of depression in older individuals. Furthermore, the benefit may favor male sports group participants.This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal.
Language: en |