20 Sept | 2024
‘la Caixa’ BPI Foundation funds research project in Sports Science Department
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The work will analyse individuals living in Residential Structures for the Elderly (ERPI) in Cova da Beira.
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The research project ‘TrackFrailty: Track to Prevent, Mitigate, and Reverse Frailty’, developed by a team of researchers from the Department of Sports Sciences (DCD) at the University of Beira Interior (UBI), has been approved for funding of 100,000 euros through the Social Research Call 2024, promoted by the Social Observatory of the ‘la Caixa’ BPI Foundation. Out of more than 400 applications, only 17 projects were funded after a long evaluation process, culminating in a public hearing to find the winners.
The research team is led by Mário Marques, Full Professor at DCD-UBI, and has the collaboration of the Department’s lecturers and researchers Henrique Neiva, Daniel Marinho, Diogo Marques and Dulce Esteves. Also collaborating on the project are Assunção Vaz Patto (lecturer at the UBI Department of Medical Sciences), Ana Torres and Jorge Costa (lecturers at the UBI Department of Psychology and Education) and Mikel Izquierdo (lecturer at the Narrava Public University).
The main objectives of the TrackFrailty project are to quantify the prevalence of physical frailty in individuals living in Residential Structures for the Elderly (ERPI) in Cova da Beira and to analyse the chronic effects of strength training with different training volumes (real effort dose) on reversing frailty. This project, according to Mário Marques, ‘will allow UBI sports science professionals to specialise in the assessment and treatment of frailty in the context of ERPI, enabling a more in-depth diagnosis of the prevalence of frailty in the Cova da Beira sub-region and the reversal of frailty through a minimum dose of strength training in institutionalised individuals’.
In addition, the project is expected to contribute to improving the well-being and quality of life of all the participants involved, from users to carers. ‘By providing clinical support and resources to assess and treat frailty syndrome in institutionalised individuals, this project will promote social inclusion in a priority sector and a region lacking in community intervention projects with practical and efficient approaches,’ stresses the principal investigator.
For Mário Marques, also a researcher at the Centre for Research in Sport, Health and Human Development (CIDESD), this distinction and the associated funding is ‘recognition of the work that has been carried out at the UBI Sports Science Department and the Centre for Research in Sport, Health and Human Development’. It is also, he adds, ‘an incentive to continue developing applied research projects in an area in which UBI and CIDESD have been increasingly prominent on the national and international scene’.
Source: Departamento de Ciências do Desporto
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