Scientists discover 3 ways to predict if a senior will be prone to falling years in advance

It’s critical that seniors be strong on their feet, as falls are the leading cause of injury in older adults.In the US alone, almost a third of people over the age of 65 fall each year, resulting in injuries and occasionally death.Falls in the elderly cost $30 billion yearly to treat and can send seniors spiraling into poor health and disability.Now, researchers from Stanford University may have found ways to identify people at risk of deadly or debilitating falls years before they reach old age.“Small balance impairments can go unnoticed until someone actually falls.

So, we wanted to ask: Can we detect these impairments before someone gets hurt?” explained Jiaen Wu, lead author of the paper.Wu’s team outfitted 10 healthy volunteers between the ages of 24 and 31 with harnesses that allowed nearly a dozen cameras to track the movement of various body parts as they walked on a treadmill.The team recorded the width between steps when walking, the difference in timing of each step and the consistency in foot placement.Participants were then asked to walk while wearing ankle braces, an eye-blocking mask and with destabilizing air jets, impediments that mimicked the effects of aging on balance and reaction speed.Armed with these inhibiting accessories, it became more difficult for participants to see their surroundings or maintain their balance, and researchers had a harder time predicting how wide or when the next step would be.Comparing the first set of normal walking data to the encumbered, researchers found that participants with the highest variance in step width, timing and foot fall in the first stage were more likely to fall in the second stage — suggesting that how someone walks in their prime could determine how likely they are to experience a fall later in life.The authors said each of these three initial walking measurements was 86% accurate in predicting if someone would experience a fall in the second experiment. “In this study, normal walking...