Osteoporosis Living with Osteoporosis

When Falling Down Isn't Funny

Are there other reasons why the elderly are at risk?
There are actually many factors that contribute to slip-and-fall accidents in the elderly. Medication side-effects can cause balance problems or dizziness, which can lead to falling. Elderly people have more chronic illnesses. Arthritis, for instance, is one of the major factors in falling. Pain associated with joints can cause falling. Fatigue, osteoporosis, dementia, and all sorts of things that more commonly strike the elderly, can lead to falls.

At what age does falling become a real risk?
Well, it's different for everybody. But after about fifty-five, our muscle mass begins to decrease and all of the factors associated with musculoskeletal degradation begin to develop. Including bone loss.

Also around age fifty-five, there is a drastic decrease in strength of the lower extremities. And this reduction in strength affects our gait style, or the way we walk. This change is one of the factors associated with how we recover from slip-and-fall accidents.

But it all depends upon a person's lifestyle. We have tested some eighty-five year old individuals who are very, very healthy and active. Their strength is maintained, and they didn't slip and fall in our tests. So age in years is not as important as actual physiological age.

Are the rates of falls different among women and men?
Elderly men fall more often than elderly women, but elderly women are more at risk of hip fractures.

We know that bones are affected by falling, but does bone loss actually play a role in causing falls?
Nobody knows at this time and that's one of the objectives of our research: to look at loss of bone mass and also gait changes associated with bone loss and perhaps it might be related to fall accidents. Hip fractures are associated closely with the osteoporosis, or a fragility of bones and their liability to fracture. And osteoporosis is much more common in women than men. But the risk of hip fracture is also related to muscle mass. You have very thin muscle lining around your hips, and as it gets thinner, it becomes very bony. When you hit that area, the fracture rate increases as well.

What you are trying to determine in your research?
We want to understand why and how people fall, and then understand their reaction to falling. Why are older individuals falling more often than the younger individuals, and why are they more often injured? We're applying biomechanical technology to answer these questions, studying when people recover from a fall, and which muscles are activated. If we know why and how this is occurring, then we could actually provide some intervention solutions.

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