Reaching recommended weekly physical activity levels reduces risk for falls in older women

Key takeaways:

• Older women who participated in at least 150 minutes of leisure-time physical activity per week had lower odds of falls.
• The findings support encouraging physical activity in that population, researchers said.

Women who met WHO’s recommended weekly level of leisure-time physical activity were at a reduced risk for both noninjurious and injurious falls, a study showed.

According to Wing S. Kwok, BAppSc, from the University of Sydney in Australia, and colleagues, WHO recommends that older adults have between 150 to 300 minutes of leisure-time physical activity (LPA) per week.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task force has also recommended exercise for adults aged 65 years and older who are at risk for falls, which are the leading cause of injury and injury-related deaths among older adults.

“With the updated guidelines on physical activity in older adults, it would be important to understand the associations between the recommended dose of physical activity and falls with and without injuries,” the researchers wrote in JAMA Network Open.

Kwok and colleagues analyzed follow-up questionnaires of 7,139 women (mean age, 67 years) who participated in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health between 2016 and 2019. According to the researchers, the women in the study reported on the weekly duration of three types of physical activity: brisk walking; moderate LPA, including social tennis, moderate-intensity exercise classes or recreational swimming; and vigorous LPA — the type of activity “that makes a person breathe harder or puff and pant,” such as aerobics or vigorous cycling, running and swimming.

Overall, LPA between 150 and less than 300 minutes a week was associated with reduced odds of:

• noninjurious falls (OR = 0.74; 95% CI, 0.59-0.92); and
• injurious falls (OR = 0.7; 95% CI, 0.56-0.88).

LPA of 300 or more minutes per week was also associated with reduced odds for:

• noninjurious falls (OR = 0.66; 95% CI,0.54-0.8); and
• injurious falls (OR = 0.77; 95% CI, 0.63-0.93).

Compared with women who reported no LPA, women who reported brisk walking (OR = 0.83; 95% CI, 0.7-0.97), moderate LPA (OR = 0.81; 95% CI, 0.7-0.93) or moderate-vigorous LPA (OR = 0.84; 95% CI, 0.7-0.99) had reduced odds of noninjurious falls.

Kwok and colleagues said it was interesting that weekly LPA of at least 300 minutes had a slightly greater reduction in noninjurious falls vs. injurious falls, whereas risk reductions for both kinds of falls were similar for those who participated in 150 to less than 300 minutes of LPA weekly.

They added that the mechanism behind the finding “is unclear, which warrants further investigation.”

There were multiple limitations in the study, the researchers pointed out. For example, the type of LPA — like yoga — was not collected, which meant the exact activity that led to fall risk reductions could not be identified.

“Meanwhile, LPA participation could change over time,” they wrote.

Still, the findings “suggest support for the widespread promotion of physical activity, including LPA, to reduce the risk of both noninjurious and injurious falls in older women,” Kwok and colleagues concluded.