Falls and fractures prevented with sunshine vitamin
Monday January 25th, 2010
Vitamin D can reduce the risk of falls among older people in hospital or nursing facilities, according to a new analysis.
The vitamin has been nick-named the "sunshine vitamin" as people need exposure to the sun to generate it in the body.
Dr Ian Cameron of the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues examined 41 trials involving 25,422 older people, mostly women. The trials covered many different interventions, including combinations of exercise, medication and appropriate equipment.
It found that in hospitals, combined interventions and supervised exercise programmes helped reduce falls. On the other hand, combined interventions were not beneficial overall in nursing homes.
Of the trials, five tested the effects of giving vitamin D to patients in nursing facilities. All five found vitamin D was "an effective measure for preventing falls".
The experts say that older people in these living conditions are much more likely to suffer a fall than those living in the community. Falls can result in head injuries and hip fractures causing unnecessary stress for the patient and staff, and bringing the risk of dangerous complications.
"However, prevention is complicated as falls usually happen for several or many different reasons," says the team.
Dr Cameron commented: "Many of the preventive measures used to avoid falls in older people are combined in what are called multifactorial interventions, so it can be very difficult to separate out the effects of all the different measures.
"In our review, we saw limited evidence that these combined interventions work, but we could more confidently recommend them if they were delivered by a multidisciplinary team. Currently, there's no one component of any of these programmes that stands out as more important than any other and we're also missing data on whether increased supervision or new technologies such as alarm systems are of any benefit."
Cameron, I. D. et al. Interventions for preventing falls in older people in nursing care facilities and hospitals. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2010, Issue 1.
Tags: Diet & Food | Geriatric Health | Orthopaedics
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