but did identify important ways for clinicians to help, including screening all older patients for fall risk and deprescribing certain medications when possible.
The study was conducted by Shalender Bhasin, MD, MBBS, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues on behalf of the Strategies to Reduce Injuries and Develop Confidence in Elders (STRIDE) trial investigators and was published online July 8 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Patients are often unaware of their increased risk until they have fallen for the first time, and they often underestimate how many of their risk factors can be improved, Dr. Bhasin said in an interview.
“Fall injuries are a very important cause of injury-related deaths among older adults, and these are preventable. Yet they are so difficult; for 30 years the rates of fall injuries have not declined,” he said.
Using a pragmatic, cluster-randomized trial, the researchers studied the clinical effectiveness of a “patient-centered intervention that combined elements of practice redesign (reconfiguration of workflow to improve quality of care) and an evidence-based, multifactorial, individually tailored intervention implemented by specially trained nurses in primary care settings,” the authors explained.
Participants in the intervention group worked with trained nurses (fall care managers) to identify their risk factors and determine which risks they wanted to modify. Participants in the control group received their typical care and a pamphlet with information on falls and were encouraged to talk with their primary care physicians (who received the results on risk factor screening) about fall prevention. Those in the intervention group also received the pamphlet.
Fall care managers evaluated patients’ home environments and in some cases visited the patient’s home, Dr. Bhasin said.
The researchers enrolled community-dwelling adults aged 70 years or older who were at higher risk for fall injuries from 86 primary care practices across 10 U.S. health care systems. Half of the practices were randomly assigned to provide the intervention to their patients; the other half of the practices provided enhanced usual care.
The researchers defined patients with increased risk for fall injuries as those who had suffered a fall-related injury at least twice during the previous year or those whose difficulties with balance or walking made them fearful of falling. Serious fall injuries were defined as falls that cause a fracture (other than a thoracic or lumbar vertebral fracture), joint dislocation, a cut needing closure, or falls that resulted in hospital admission for a “head injury, sprain or strain, bruising or swelling, or other serious injury,” they explained.
Demographic and baseline characteristics were similar for both groups of patients (mean age, 80 years; 62.0% women); 38.9% had experienced a fall-related injury during the previous year, and 35.1% had suffered at least two falls during the previous year.
The researchers hypothesized that serious fall injuries would be 20% lower in the intervention group, compared with the control group, but that was not the case.
The findings showed no significant difference between the intervention group (4.9 events per 100 person-years of follow-up) and the control group (5.3 events per 100 person-years of follow-up) for the rate of first adjudicated serious fall injury (hazard ratio, 0.92; P = .25). Results were similar in a practice-level analysis and a sensitivity analysis adjusted for participant-level covariates.
However, there was a difference in rates of first participant-reported fall injury, which was a secondary endpoint, at 25.6 events per 100 person-years of follow-up among participants in the intervention group versus 28.6 events among those in the control group (HR, 0.90; P = .004).
There were no significant differences between the groups for rates of all adjudicated serious fall injuries and all patient-reported fall injuries. Bone fractures and injuries resulting in hospitalization were the most frequent types of adjudicated serious fall injuries.
Rates of serious adverse events resulting in hospitalization were similar for the intervention group and the control group (32.8 and 33.3 hospitalizations per 100 person-years of follow-up, respectively), as well as rates of death (3.3 deaths per 100 person-years of follow-up in both groups).