Falls Haunt Lives of Elderly

If one is 65 or older one of the specters that is most personally haunting is the possibility of a fall. One-third of the individuals in that age range do fall with the result that hundreds of thousands suffer from devastating hip fractures each year.

According to research published in the JAMA Internal Medicine, and reported on by Hannah Stuart, writing for MDNews, more than a third of the elderly living in nursing homes died within six months of fracturing a hip. Nearly half of hip fracture patients in nursing homes die within one year of their break or are rendered incapable of independent locomotion.

Running counter to this trend is the fact that the number of orthopedic procedures performed on patients over the age of 80 has increased. According to the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, the rate per 100, 000 people over age 80 rose from 181 in 2000 to 257 in 2009 for total hip arthroplasty and from 300 to 477 for total knee arthroplasty over the same time period.

At the same time, according to Stuart, in-hospital mortality rates fell as did rates of complication among patients who had few or no comorbidities.

Stuart wrote that 90% of the elderly patients studied reported a reduction of pain following a knee replacement, 85% of their artificial knees were still functioning after 20 years of use and 60% of the joint replacement patients were women. Ten percent of the patients required revision surgery on their knee replacements after 10 years of use.