If you’re living with muscular dystrophy (MD), multiple sclerosis (MS), post-polio syndrome (PPS), or spinal cord injury (SCI) that impacts your mobility, falls may be an everyday part of your life. Falls are harmful both from the injuries that we may suffer as well as the fear that may impact how we live our day to day lives after a fall. Sometimes injuries from a fall are minor cuts and bruises, but other times injuries are severe, like a broken hip or back that drastically impacts our lives. In the worst cases, the injuries are deadly. After a fall, the fear may keep us at home and we might limit our activities, even activities that bring us great joy. Sometimes we may realize that fear is guiding how we do things, but other times we might not even be aware of it. We were interested in learning more about how many people living with MD, MS, PPS, or SCI report falling. Also, we were interested in what types of factors place people with these conditions at higher risk for falls.
We asked about 2,000 people living with MD, MS, PPS, and SCI about falls in the last 12 months. We also asked about other things that might place someone at risk for falling such as their age, gender, walking ability, and how long they’ve had MD, MS, PPS, or SCI. We also asked about their vision, balance, and weakness. We asked how often they exercised and how many other health conditions (like diabetes or cardiovascular disease) they had. When we studied the answers, we first looked at how often people reported falling. We knew that age and walking ability may be really important. We looked at the how often people reported falling by age and walking ability. Then we looked at each condition separately, MS, MD, PPS, and SCI. For each condition, we looked at which risk factors could better group people who reported falling from those that didn’t.
People living with MD, MS, PPS, or SCI reporting falling more often than not. Seven out of 10 People with MD that filled out our survey reported falling. About 2 – 3 of every 4 people with PPS or MS reported falling. Lastly, 2 out of every 5 people with SCI reported falling. A greater number of falls reported were from people who were middle-aged (45 to 65 years old) and who described their walking ability as limited, using an assistive device such as a cane, crutch, or walker.
People who were at risk of falling was different per each condition, however, walking ability was a risk factor across all 4 conditions, except for PPS. For people with MS, being a man, having more health conditions, and trouble with balance placed you at higher risk of falling. For MD, trouble with balance placed you at greater risk. For PPS, vision trouble placed you at higher risk. For SCI, if you had a greater number of other health conditions, that placed you at higher risk.
For those living with MD, MS, PPS, and SCI, are you worried about falling? Falls are preventable. Here’s what we recommend:
Patricia Matsuda, PT, DPT is a physical therapist for UW Medicine’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and is an expert in falls and fall prevention.
Matsuda PN, Verrall AM, Finlayson, ML, Molton IR, Jensen MP. 2015. Falls Among Adults Aging with Disability. Arch Phys Med Rehabil, Mar; 96 (3): 464-71.