Each year the Network completes two mini reviews, summarising the emerging evidence in specific areas of fall prevention research.
DEMENTIA AND FALLS
Cameron Hicks1,2, Kim Delbaere1,2, Daina Sturnieks1,2, Morag Taylor1,2
1 Falls, Balance and Injury Research Centre, Neuroscience Research Australia; 2 Faculty of Medicine and Health, UNSW
This 'mini-evidence' review summarises the latest evidence for fall risk factors in people living with dementia. Risk factors discussed include:
- balance and walking
- inactivity and functional impairment
- medication use
-
cognition
- behavioral and psychological symptoms
The paper also summaries the evidence for fall prevention interventions across hospital, community, residential aged care facilitates.
Introduction
Dementia is a term for a range of progressive neurological conditions where there is impairment of one or more higher cognitive functions (executive function, learning and memory, language, complex attention, perceptual-motor and social cognition) that cannot be better explained by another medical condition [1]. Dementia encompasses Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, LATE (Limbic-predominant age-associated TDP-43 encephalopathy), frontotemporal dementia and mixed pathology. In 2022, over 400,000 Australians were estimated to be living with dementia
and the financial burden of dementia was estimated at $9.8 billion [2]. Although there is some evidence that the incidence of dementia is decreasing, dementia remains a growing public health issue as a result of population ageing [3, 4]. The number of Australians living with dementia is expected to reach 850,000 by 2058 [2] while the financial burden of dementia is predicted to rise to $24.1 billion in 2056 [5].
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