Strotmeyer Et Al. (2010) Research Regarding Long-Term

¶ … Strotmeyer et al. (2010) research regarding long-term retention of older adults within a given health study. This review will examine the content and structure of this article to determine its practical applications and to reveal key learning points that may be used in future examinations regarding the same topic. Article Concept Firstly the aim of this study was to examine the aging population as its demographical influence is described as important and impactful.

The object of this study was to understand the idea of retention as it applies to these older people. The article's definition of the word retention is cumbersome and requires some deep thinking to understand the complicated words of the definition. The authors defined retention as "retaining surviving participants enrolled at baseline for subsequent assessments in a longitudinal cohort study." The word "baseline" is never adequately contextualized in this article, requiring the reader to insert some assumptions.

The main aim of this research was to examine another large study and determine how old people maintain their relationships to longitudinal studies. The authors essentially documented their investigation into redefining and understanding the idea of retention and how it factors with the ability to maintain long lasting studies. Research Design The Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS) was introduced as the target for the research contained in this article. The CHS "is a population-based, longitudinal study of coronary heart disease and stroke in adults aged 65 years and older.

The main objective of the study is to identify factors related to the onset and course of coronary heart disease and stroke. CHS is designed to determine the importance of conventional cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in older adults, and to identify new risk factors in this age group, especially those that may be protective and modifiable." The aims of this research was no to test a specific hypothesis, but rather investigate the results of the CHS.

This is explicitly communicated within the introduction and is quite simple in its wording. The intervention of this research was conducted by the authors contacting the participants of the CHS every 6 months with annual assessments through 1999. Based on the researchers aims of their article, this longitudinal investigation is very appropriate and provided a useful model to measure the experiences of the elderly. The research design was very specific and examined only one study. This must be factored into the validity of the implications of the article.

The research ultimately concluded: "Our results in CHS clearly illustrate that retention over a very long follow-up period becomes increasingly challenging at advanced ages. The oldest old (>80 years) adults have the poorest retention compared to other age groups of older adults - particularly for in-person visits.

Loss to follow-up is expected in the oldest age group; however retaining these oldest adults for longitudinal studies is critical, as they experience dynamic changes in risk factors and health outcomes." The obviousness of this conclusion suggests that this research design was not very useful, however when the data is examined closer, there are many diverging facts that can help in determining new ways to approach longitudinal studies with the elderly. Analysis The article gathered data on certain variable such as age, sex, health habits and other descriptive characteristics.

This data was ordered in several figures that presented the odds of certain results happening within the study. The data itself was not statistically modified with power analysis because the research did not call for such action. Since the main aim of this research was purely descriptive, there was no need to manipulate data for any type of modeling or statistical inference. The article was merely a study of a study and reveals many obvious truths such as old people become unreliable as they age.

The idea of retention is satisfactorily defined and explored in this article which was it set out to do, making the research successful at that level. The CHS is a limited study with less than 1500 participants making the study invalid in the larger scheme of things due to this myopic and single minded investigation. There was no need for a power analysis because the statistical inference of the data did not call.