{"doi":"10.1093/gerona/glac056","title":"The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Older Women in the Women’s Health Initiative","abstract":"BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a health crisis of which older adults are a high-risk group for severe illness and mortality. The objectives of this article are to describe the methods and responses to a COVID-19 survey administered by the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) to assess the impact of the pandemic on older women. METHODS: WHI is an ongoing prospective cohort study that recruited 161 808 postmenopausal women from 1993 to 1998. From June 2020 to October 2020, participants in active follow-up were surveyed by mail, phone, or online to assess health and well-being, living situations, lifestyle, health care, and self-reported COVID-19 testing, treatment, and preventive behaviors. RESULTS: Of 64 061 eligible participants, 49 695 (average age 83.6 years ± 5.6) completed the COVID-19 survey (response rate 77.6%). Many participants reported very good or good well-being (75.6%). Respondents reported being very concerned about the pandemic (51.1%; more common in urban compared to rural areas), with 6.9% reporting disruptions in living arrangements and 9.7% reporting changes in medication access. Participants (54.4%) reported physical activity levels were much less or somewhat less compared to levels before the pandemic, and this was more pronounced in urban areas versus rural areas (55.3% vs 44.4%). Participants engaged in preventive behaviors including wearing a face mask (93.2%). A total of 18.9% reported testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), among whom 3.5% (n = 311) reported testing positive. CONCLUSIONS: In this nationwide survey of older U.S. women, the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with impacts on health and well-being, living situations, lifestyle, health care access, and SARS-CoV-2 testing and preventive behaviors.","journal":"The Journals of Gerontology Series A","year":2022,"id":249757,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":27,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.5787,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":33532,"name":"Holly R. Harris","orcid":"0000-0002-2572-6727","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":342795,"name":"Lesley F. Tinker","orcid":"0000-0003-2469-1929","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":11268,"name":"JoAnn E. Manson","orcid":"0000-0002-9426-7595","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":710017,"name":"Jaymie R. Meliker","orcid":"0000-0002-6408-8596","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":303808,"name":"Sylvia Wassertheil‐Smoller","orcid":"0000-0002-5447-4653","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":272433,"name":"Aladdin H. Shadyab","orcid":"0000-0002-9693-0522","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":11827,"name":"Nazmus Saquib","orcid":"0000-0002-2819-2839","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":243116,"name":"Garnet L. Anderson","orcid":"0000-0001-5087-7837","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":482247,"name":"Sally A. Shumaker","orcid":null,"position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":321493,"name":"Trang VoPham","orcid":"0000-0003-4787-1201","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":32,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:24:23.754337Z","pmid":"35238375","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}