Introduction: Research indicates gender differences in functional performance at advanced ages, but little is known about their impact on longevity for men and women.
Objective: To derive a set of motor function factors from a battery of functional performance measures and examine their associations with mortality, incorporating possible gender interactions.
Method: Analyses were performed on the longitudinal Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging (SATSA) including twenty-four assessments of motor function up to six times over a 19-year period. Three motor factors were derived from several factor analyses; fine motor, balance/upper strength, and flexibility. A latent growth curve model was used to capture longitudinal age changes in the motor factors and generated estimates of intercept at age 70 (I), rates of change before (S1) and after age 70 (S2) for each factor. Cox regression models were used to determine how gender in interaction with the motor factors was related to mortality.
