Outcomes in elderly fall victims: what happens after hospital discharge?

Demographics and Incident Location of Traumatic Injuries at a Single Level I Trauma Center

“…A previous study found that among elderly fall injury patients who lived at home or independently before hospital admission, 37.3% were discharged to a nursing home or skilled nursing facility, suggesting that fall injuries can be harmful and debilitating for those 65 years or older. 19 An overwhelming majority of patients who fell did so while standing, sitting, or lying. This finding suggested that daily tasks such as getting out of bed or standing up in the bathtub may be factors in fall injuries.…”

Falls and long-term survival among older adults residing in care homes

“…A limitation of our study is that we only included residents who had suffered a fall during the month prior to the baseline interview in the analyses so we cannot rule out that some residents died shortly after the fall but before the interview (post-fall in-hospital mortality has been reported as between 3.7% and 16% [15,16,18,40,41]). Furthermore, residents who had suffered a fall and survived the first month could be stronger than non-fallers.…”

“…Second, some deaths might not have been reported, something that would eventually generate non-differential misclassification and, in general, lead to underestimation of the associations. Third, after a fall, mortality is higher in patients discharged into skilled nursing care or into a nursing home [15,16]. As we studied care home residents, patients with better prognoses after a fall might not have been included in our study, but rather returned home instead of entering a care home.…”

“…Moreover, the large sample size of the study limits random error. We have included the most important confounding variables in the analysis, such as urinary incontinence, comorbidities, age, sex and functional dependency [15,40,[42][43][44]. Furthermore, these variables may collectively serve as proxies for unmeasured potential confounding factors, such as frailty.…”

“…Despite the substantial number and significant consequences of aging adults' accidental falls, it is remarkable that a relatively limited number of recent studies have analyzed the longterm mortality of accidental falls in older adults. Moreover, most of these studies come from hospital settings [15][16][17][18] rather than community settings [19] and the scant literature that compares the long-term mortality risk after a fall with an appropriate control group is either not recent [20][21][22][23] or limited to women [24]. The study of long-term survival could add further insight into the real burden of this important problem, particularly in nursing homes where falls are frequent; as far as we know, no recent study has properly focused on falls' longterm consequences in a representative sample of nursing home residents.…”