Abstract

Impairment is a medical condition in the disablement process. ‘Self Assessed Health’ (SAH) is an individual’s comprehensive assessment of own general health status. Several studies suggest a fairly good relationship between SAH and objective assessment of health. However, it is not known if such a relationship holds good in the Indian context. The objectives of the present study are to examine the levels of selected body impairment among the elderly population and to study the association between impairment and SAH. Data for the study were collected from 2028 aged respondents of both the sex from Cuttack city of Odisha state under the Indian Union.
Logistic regression of SAH on different levels of impairments suggests that near-vision, hearing, speaking, and biting-chewing food are not significant predictors of self assessed good health. On the other hand, distance vision, distance hearing, climbing a flight of stairs, bending-kneeling on the floor and lifting-carrying a shopping bag are significant predictors of self assessed good health.

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