Assessment of the influence of socio-economic status on aging males’ symptoms in Ijesaland, South-Western Nigeria

Background

Aging issues are becoming a very serious concern in many developing countries, particularly the health care needs and challenges of the elderly. Crucial among these are the sexual, psychosocial and somatic challenges facing the elderly, and the factors that may influence these. The Aging Males’ Symptoms (AMS) scale was primarily designed for international comparability on measures of quality of life (QoL) among the elderly. The validity and reliability of this instrument have been tested in Nigeria and results confirm its comparability with results from other countries. It is pertinent to examine the influence of some socio-economic factors on the self-reported severity of sexual, psychosocial and somatic measures on the AMS.

Methods

The AMS instrument was administered to 456 males aged 60 years and above in selected communities in Ijesaland, South-West Nigeria. The AMS has 17 items and scoring was done on a scale of 1–5 based on the level of severity. Three outcome variables for psychosocial, somatic and sexual scores were used together with socio-economic variables as co-variates. STATA 11 was used for the analyses, which included frequency distribution, chi-square test and logistic regression model.

Results

In the bi-variate analysis, wealth index was the only statistically significant variable for predicting the odds of each of the three outcome variables. A logistic regression model showed that higher education and middle income were significant predictors of high severity on the psychosocial score. Oldest age group, polygamous union and a high wealth index were significant predictors of higher somatic scores. None of the co-variates were significantly associated with the sexual score.

Conclusion

The study concluded that wealth index and other proxies of empowerment, such as education, to a great extent influence quality of life.