The Development of Geriatric Everyday Life Health Index (GELHI)

Abstract

Geriatric hearing loss can be related to dementia and mental health status. As the symptoms of dementia includes impairments of memory, naming, visuospatial dysfunction, and mental health status, the hearing loss might aggravate those symptoms and vise versa. Therefore, the degree of these symptoms should be evaluated for successful aural rehabilitation of the elderly hearing impaired. Korean version of Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE-K) has been commonly used for assessing dementia for Korean and Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire (SPMSQ) has been widely used to check the status of the mental health of the elderly. However, they are not appropriate for assessing for the baseline and improvement of aural rehabilitation due to old-fashioned and biased characteristics of questions. Applying MMSE-K and SPMSQ, new simple geriatric mental health assessment tool, Geriatric Everyday Life Health Index (GELHI) was developed in Korean version considering Korean culture and current social situations with 12 testing items. GELHI evaluates the short-term and long-term memory, daily life, the recent events, mathematical calculations and so on. The scores ranges from 0 to 12, which indicates normal to severe impairment of intellectual capacity and mental health status of the elderly. GELHI was administered to 207 people aged over 65 years, 87 males and 120 females, by interviewing technique. The internal consistency of GELHI was verified by Cronbach alpha, .688, showing high homogeneity of the scale. The reliability of GELHI ｗas found to be acceptable with Guttman's split-half correlation coefficient, .728. GElHI scores were influenced by gender, age, educational status, marital status, health status, economic status, and the frequency of contacts of their sons and daughters. GELHI was appeared to assess various cognitive and intellectual functions of the elderly in terms of mental health status. Therefore, GEHLI can be applied for setting a baseline and assessing the degree of improvement for rehabilitation process in a variety of geriatric cognitive disorder. Especially, GELHI can be utilized for the elderly hearing impaired who have week mental health status but need decent rehabilitation.