Article
Fall prevention
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Authors
Published: | December 18, 2006 |
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Outline
Text
Background
Falls and falls causing injuries belong to the most common and most severe incidents in later life. The annual number of hip fractures has risen by more than 20% during the last five years in Germany. Falls often lead to a loss in physical function and a loss in self-efficacy. More than 10,000 nursing home admissions are caused by a fall, annually. The medical cost exceed 1 billion Euros.
Interventions
The Cochrane group has now registered more than 100 controlled trials. These differ in terms of target groups, setting, site of recruitment, professions involved in the delivery and the type of intervention included. Different meta-analysis demonstrate that the most successful interventions combined strength and balance training. The programmes had to be progressive, intensive lasting for more than three month. The exercises should be performed twice weekly.
Perspectives
It is the challenge for the next ten years to develop sustainable fall prevention programmes or several hundred thousand elderly living in the community. These should be targeted. Organisational, financial and psychological aspects will be as important as the content in order to ensure the effectiveness. The paper will present data and prespectives developed in studies conducted by the authors (http://www.aktivinjedemalter.de/) as well as ProFaNE (http://www.profane.eu.org/).