2 About one in ten falls results in serious injuries such as hip fracture, other fractures, subdural hematoma, or traumatic brain injury. More than 30% of people over 65 years of age fall each year and in half of the cases falls are recurrent. This can protect against falls, fractures, and the effects of aging (ie, slower reflexes), factors that can cause a relatively slight fall to be potentially dangerous. For example, in osteoporosis, prevention and management should not only focus on bone strengthening but rather on subjects’ muscle function and balance, which are directly linked to the disease. This propensity of the elderly to injuries results from the high incidence of accompanying diseases. In addition to falls occurring at high frequency in the elderly (children and athletes have an even higher incidence of falls), a key point is that the increased incidence of falls is combined with an increased susceptibility to injury. Falls have a proven association with mortality, morbidity, reduced functionality, and premature nursing home admissions are usually the result of interaction of multiple and diverse risk factors and situations that many times may be corrected and their interaction is modified by age, disease, and the presence of hazards in the environment. 2 Falls are one of the most frequent and serious problems facing the elderly.
1 Tinetti et al, in a pioneer paper published in 1988, defined a fall as an event which results in a person coming to rest unintentionally on the ground or other lower level, not as a result of a major intrinsic event (such as stroke) or overwhelming hazard. A fall is an event which results in a person coming to rest inadvertently on the ground or other lower level, not as a consequence of the following: sustaining a violent blow, loss of consciousness, sudden onset of paralysis, or an epileptic seizure.
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