Falling: Is It Due To Age Or Health Issues?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝What are the signs that a senior is falling due to health issues rather than just aging?❞

Superficial answer: having an ear infection can result in a loss of balance, and is not particularly tied to age as a risk factor

More useful answer: first, let’s consider these two true statements:

• The risks of falling (both the probability and the severity of consequences) increase with age
• Health issues (in general) tend to increase with age

With this in mind, it’s difficult to disconnect the two, as neither exist in a vacuum, and each is strongly associated with the other.

So the question is easier to answer by first flipping it, to ask:

❝What are the health issues that typically increase with age, that increase the chances of falling?❞

A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Loss of strength due to sarcopenia (reduced muscle mass)
• Loss of mobility due to increased stiffness (many causes, most of which worsen with age)
• Loss of risk-awareness due to diminished senses (for example, not seeing an obstacle until too late)
• Loss of risk-awareness due to reduced mental focus (cognitive decline producing absent-mindedness)

Note that in the last example there, and to a lesser extent the third one, reminds us that falls also often do not happen in a vacuum. There is (despite how it may sometimes feel!) no actual change in our physical relationship with gravity as we get older; most falls are about falling over things, even if it’s just one’s own feet:

The 4 Bad Habits That Cause The Most Falls While Walking

Disclaimer: sometimes a person may just fall down for no external reason. An example of why this may happen is if a person’s joint (for example an ankle or a knee) has a particular weakness that means it’ll occasionally just buckle and collapse under one’s own weight. This doesn’t even have to be a lot of weight! The weakness could be due to an old injury, or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (with its characteristic joint hypermobility symptoms), or something else entirely.

Now, notice how:

• all of these things can happen at any age
• all of these things are more likely to happen the older we get
• none of these things have to happen at any age

That last one’s important to remember! Aging is often viewed as an implacable Behemoth, but the truth is that it is many-faceted and every single one of those facets can be countered, to a greater or lesser degree.

Think of a room full of 80-year-olds, and now imagine that…

• One has the hearing of a 20-year-old
• One has the eyesight of a 20-year-old
• One has the sharp quick mind of a 20-year-old
• One has the cardiovascular fitness of a 20-year-old

…etc. Now, none of those things in isolation is unthinkable, so remember, there is no magic law of the universe saying we can’t have each of them:

Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

Which means: that goes for the things that increase the risk of falling, too. In other words, we can combat sarcopenia with protein and resistance training, maintain our mobility, look after our sensory organs as best we can, nourish our brain and keep it sharp, etc etc etc:

Train For The Event Of Your Life! (Mobility As A Long-Term “Athletic” Goal For Personal Safety)

Which doesn’t mean: that we will necessarily succeed in all areas. Your writer here, broadly in excellent health, and whose lower body is still a veritable powerhouse in athletic terms, has a right ankle and left knee that will sometimes just buckle (yay, the aforementioned hypermobility).

So, it becomes a priority to pre-empt the consequences of that, for example:

• being able to fall with minimal impact (this is a matter of knowing how, and can be learned from “soft” martial arts such as aikido), and
• ensuring the skeleton can take a knock if necessary (keeping a good balance of vitamins, minerals, protein, etc; keeping an eye on bone density).

See also:

Fall Special ← appropriate for the coming season, but it’s about avoiding falling, and reducing the damage of falling if one does fall, including some exercises to try at home.

Take care!