Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Modeling Cumulative Risk During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Psychosocial And Socioeconomic Factors For Older Minority Adults, James F. Osborne Iv

LSU Master's Theses

Continued response to the sum consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has disparately affected the physical and mental health of older minority adults in the United States. SARS-CoV-2 created an acute epidemiological crisis of public health coinciding with a chronic pandemic of accentuated psychosocial stress. Biological and socio-economic risk of morbidity and mortality follow a demographic gradient of subjectively constructed social status that disproportionally threatens older adults and minority racial/ethnic communities. Pathways to increased socio-economic and psychosocial vulnerability are multifactorial and complex. Factors of race, socio-economic status, gender, and age, each contribute to individualized profiles of vulnerability to risk exposure.

The …

Exploring Predictors Of Older Adults' Performance On A Novel Driving Simulator Task, John Philip Bernstein

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

On a per-mile driven basis, older adults are at increased risk of being involved in an automobile accident. The development and implementation of driving assessment tools is necessary to inform decisions about driving reduction and cessation. Driving simulators are one method of assessing driving performance and safety, however many simulators are cost-prohibitive for most researchers and clinicians. Additionally, while driving performance has been previously explored with respect to clinical populations (e.g., Alzheimer’s Disease), less work has evaluated this topic in a cognitively healthy sample. The present study sought to determine whether a novel, cost-effective driving simulator (Assetto Corsa (AC)) might …

The Effects Of Aging And Unilateral Vestibular Disorders On The Kinematic Performance Of Vestibular Rehabilitation Exercises And Physical Function, Micah Leslie Bradshaw Klumpp

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The overall purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of unilateral vestibular disorders and aging on functional performances of activities of daily living and vestibular rehabilitation exercises by examining the correlations among actual and perceived functional measures, the kinematic measurement differences among young healthy adults, older healthy adults, and older adults with unilateral vestibular deficits, and the correlations between kinematic and functional measures. Perceived and actual functional abilities and kinematic variables were compared for young controls, older healthy controls, and patients with unilateral vestibular hypofunction with no previous vestibular rehabilitation. In older adults, better strength, balance, coordination, and …