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Vitamin D may decrease the incidence of falls in nursing care facilities
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A recent Cochrane Review indicates that giving vitamin D supplements to people living in nursing care facilities may reduce the rate of falls, while using multifactorial interventions and supervised exercise programs may prove beneficial in helping patients avoid falls in the hospital setting.
Preventing falls in older populations in nursing facilities and hospitals can be complicated as these events occur for several different reasons, the lead researcher for the study, Ian D. Cameron, MBBS, PhD, FAFRM (RACP), noted in a press release.
“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,” Cameron stated in the release.
In their review, Cameron and his colleagues researched 41 trials including 25,422 older people. Most of the participants were women. The investigators discovered that five of these trials examined the impact of prescribing vitamin D to participants in nursing facilities and found that the intervention was successful in preventing falls.
The investigators also found that using multifactorial interventions incorporating exercise, medication or environmental factors, such as appropriate equipment, decreased the risk of falls for patients in hospitals; but had no significant overall impact in nursing homes. However, the investigators noted that such interventions provided by multifactorial teams may reduce the rate of falls in nursing homes.
“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,” Cameron stated. “Currently, there is no one component of any of these programs that stands out as more important than any other and we are also missing data on whether increased supervision or new technologies such as alarm systems are of any benefit.”
- References:
Cameron ID, Murray GR, Gillespie LD, et al. Interventions for preventing falls in older people in nursing care facilities and hospitals. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2010 Jan 20;(1):CD005465.