Healthy Ageing: A Comparative Analysis of Health Promoting Lifestyle among Elderly Males and Females in Shiraz City

The aim of the paper is to estimate the prevalence and factors associated to health promoting lifestyles with emphasis investigate gender differences among older adults. The participants of this study consisted of 400 elderly males and females (aged 60 years and more) from Shiraz city, who chosen by proportional stratified-sampling method.
Binary analysis showed gender predicts significantly scores of four of six health-promoting lifestyle subs-cales. In fact, we found out that females had higher scores of health responsibility and interpersonal relations than males, and vis-a-vis males had higher scores of physical activity and stress management than females. But, that there was no significant difference between gender and scores of two subscales; nutrition and spiritual growth. For overall health-promoting lifestyle, binary analysis showed males has higher score than females, although this result wasn’t statistically significant. Multivariate analysis (MCA) showed health promoting lifestyle score were positively associated with female gender. In fact, controlling for socio-economic variables (such as age, education, Occupation, income, living arrangement, self-efficacy, and so on), we found significant difference in health promoting lifestyle between men and women, with women having higher mean score. Overall, Apart from biological differences between women and men, social conditions and inequality result to unfair healthy behaviors outcome among men and women.