Manual Ability Index in Elderly Population

Aging is a complex multifactorial process, the basic mechanism of which is not fully elucidated and leads to deterioration of biological functions.It is stated that the loss of hand function seen in the elderly leads to poor performance in activities of daily living and recreational activities. For this reason, performance measurements in the elderly should include hand function measurement and aim to measure the adequacy and participation of the functions that the elderly person frequently uses in daily life activities. Scales applied to evaluate hand function are generally performance-based. The hand ability scale is among the scales that evaluate hand functions. The scale is used in the subjective evaluation of upper extremity functions and many parameters related to daily living activities in neurological and musculoskeletal problems.Healthy volunteers over the age of 65 were reached from various centers in Isparta, especially the applications made through the announcements on the bulletin boards on the Süleyman Demirel University campus. Each participant was informed about the content of the study, and the volunteers read and signed informed consent forms. Before the formal questionnaire, the pre-final Turkish version of the questionnaire was used for a pilot test. The Turkish translation was primarily applied to five participants for the detection of unintelligible questions or words. Turkish translation was applied to five participants in order to determine the questions or words that were not understood. Investigators asked the participants the following questions: "Is there a question you don't understand?" "Are there any words you don't like?" Since the participants did not have any problems, no changes were made in the questionnaire and the final Turkish version of the MAM (MAM-T) was provided.

Inclusion criteria

• Being 65 years or older,
• Being literate,
• Volunteering to participate in the research,
• It means getting a score of 24 or above when the Standardized Mini Mental Test Score is applied.

Exclusion criteria

• Having a condition that prevents them from performing daily life activities,
• Having serious vision and hearing loss,
• Having any neurological, orthopedic or rheumatological comorbidities that may affect hand functions, such as diagnosed stroke, carpal tunnel, lateral epicondylitis,
• Having a diagnosed psychiatric disorder,
• Lack of cooperation,
• Being in the recovery period of an acute illness.