New Cochrane review assesses the benefits and harms of exercise for preventing falls in older people living in the community

New evidence published in the Cochrane Library today provides strong evidence that falls in people over sixty-years old can be prevented by exercise programmes.Falls are a leading cause of accidental or unintentional injury deaths worldwide. Older adults suffer the greatest number of fatal falls and over 37 million falls are severe enough to require medical attention each year.A new Cochrane Review produced by a team comprising researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia and University of Oxford, UK,summarizes the results from108 randomized controlled trials with 23,407 participants from across 25 countries. The average age of the participants in the studies was 76 years old and three quarters of them were women. Eighty-one of these trials compared exercise (all types) versus a control intervention (doing no exercise or minimal gentle exercise that is not thought to reduce falls) in people living independently at home, in retirement villages, or in sheltered accommodation.The review looked at two different ways of measuring falls. Firstly, they found that exercise reduces the number of falls over time by around a quarter (23% reduction). This means that if there were 850 falls among 1000 older people doing no fall-preventive exercise during one year, there would be 195 fewer falls among  people who were undertaking fall-prevention exercise. They also found that exercise reduces the number of people experiencing one or more falls (number of fallers) by around a six...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news