ABSTRACT

As the life expectancy increases, people with spinal cord injuries are also naturally aging, and the average age of people with spinal cord injuries is rising as a number of older adults suffer spinal cord injuries due to traumatic injuries, falls, or chronic diseases. As a result, the question of the quality of life of older adults with spinal cord injury has emerged. People with spinal cord injuries are more vulnerable to aging than non-disabled people. Especially, older adults with spinal cord injuries have a higher prevalence of chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease than non-disabled older adults, and the decline in physical functioning due to aging is faster; hence, the quality of life is generally lower as well. However, some studies have reported that the quality of life of people with spinal cord injuries is relatively stable and does not decline as much as expected with age. This is because there are some factors increasing the quality of life by adversely acting on a number of factors that degrade the quality of life of the elderly with spinal cord injury, including disability period, subjective feeling of happiness or life satisfaction, disability acceptance, presence of pain, presence of depression, and so on. In addition, because the tools assessing the quality of life mainly focus on objective conditions such as health, economic status, environment, and leisure life, it is also ineffective to reflect the subjective quality of life such as happiness and satisfaction of the disabled. Research on the aging and quality of life of people with spinal cord injuries has still been in the rudimentary stage and remains a field to fill the gap through many studies in the future.