Home Health & Hospice Week

You should consider putting your patients who have diminished eyesight on the watch list for falls too, suggest findings from a newly published study.

In the study, researchers from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, split participants into three groups: older adults who had fallen in the last 12 months, older adults who hadn't fallen, and younger adults. Then they had the participants walk a course with and without vision-impairing goggles.

The younger adult and older adult without fall groups both reduced their walking speed on the course when their vision was impaired, says the study published in the summer issue of the journal Insight: Research and Practice in Visual Impairment and Blindness. The fall-prone group, however, did not walk more slowly and made more errors.

"The fall-prone older adults displayed an overreliance on visual information for spatial cognition, but at the same time they did not adjust their behavior to compensate for their lack of visual information," says a release about the study. "Spatial cognition may be more greatly compromised among fall-prone older adults."

The article is at http://www2.allenpress.com/pdf/aerj-04-03-103-111.pdf .