Gait Variability And Fall Risk
Gait Variability and Fall Risk in Older Adults
Abdulrahman M. Aldahmashi University of Pittsburgh Motor Learning and Control of Movement
Dr. Susan Whitney November 2, 2014
Introduction
Falling is described as resting on the ground or the floor accidently without being caused by intrinsic
incident or tremendous hazard (Ayoubi & Launay, 2014; Tuunainen, Rasku, Jäntti, & Pyykkö,
2014). It is also defined as unexpected, unintended, unprovoked alteration in body position causing
an individual to be in an inferior level and not resulted from internal disturbance (Menant, Schoene,
Sarofim, & Lord, 2014).
Background Information
Fall is the major cause of injury in the elderly, which places more load on the health care system
(Krasovsky, Lamontagne, Feldman, & Levin, 2014). Samuel D. Towne Jr. and his colleagues
conducted a study to calculate the cost of hospitalizing older people as a result of falling in Texas
Hospital. 77,086 fallers were hospitalized, costing around 3.1 billion dollars in 2011, which is an
increase of around 2 billion dollars since 2007 (Towne, Ory, & Smith, 2014). Moreover, fall directly
causes 21,649 deaths and indirectly causes 5,402 deaths in the United States in 2010 (Stevens &
Rudd, 2014). Also, 420,000 individuals around the world die yearly because of falling (Mignardot et
al., 2014). Most falls in older adults take place during walking (Lee, Verghese, Holtzer, Mahoney, &
Oh–Park, 2014). Therefore, falls are related to gait variability
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