The following is a summary of “Emergency Department Visits for Alcohol-Associated Falls Among Older Adults in the United States, 2011 to 2020,” published in the December 2023 issue of Emergency Medicine by Yuan, et al.
For a study, researchers sought to look into the risk factors for accidents caused by falls in US people aged 65 and up. They looked at trips to the emergency room (ED) by people who hurt themselves in a fall from 2011 to 2020 as part of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program. They used demographic and clinical data to estimate the yearly national rate of ED visits for falls caused by alcohol and the share of these falls among ED visits for falls in older people. Joinpoint regression was used to look at changes in ED visits related to falls caused by drinking between 2011 and 2019 for different age groups of older adults and to see how these changes compared to changes seen in younger adults.
There were 9,657 (weighted national estimate: 618,099) visits to the emergency room for falls caused by drinking. This is 2.2% of all fall trips to the emergency room among older people from 2011 to 2020. Men were more likely than women to go to the emergency room because of a fall and be drunk (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR]=3.6, 95% CI 2.9 to 4.5). The most common body parts injured in falls caused by drinking were the head and face, and the most common description was an abdominal injury. The number of visits to the emergency room by older people for falls caused by drinking rose yearly from 2011 to 2019 (annual percent change of 7.5, 95% CI 6.1 to 8.9).
The rise was similar for adults aged 55 to 64; younger age groups did not show a steady rise. Their results show that during the study time, more and more older people went to the emergency room because they had fallen while drinking. A nurse in the emergency room (ED) can check older people to see if they are at risk of falling and look for risk factors that can be changed, like drinking, to help determine who could benefit from help to lower their risk.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0196064423003001
