Preventing falls among older people with mental health problems : a systematic review

© 2014 Bunn et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.Falls are a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in older people and the risk of falling is exacerbated by mental health conditions. Existing reviews have focused on people with dementia and cognitive impairment, but not those with other mental health conditions or in mental health settings. The objective of this review is to evaluate the effectiveness of fall prevention interventions for older people with mental health problems being cared for across all settingsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Evaluating the Sense of Safety and Security in Human - Robot Interaction with Older People

For many applications where interaction between robots and older people takes place, safety and security are key dimensions to consider. ‘Safety’ refers to a perceived threat of physical harm, whereas ‘security’ is a broad term which refers to many aspects related to health, well-being, and aging. This chapter presents a quantitative evaluation tool of the sense of safety and security for robots in elder care. By investigating the literature on measurement of safety and security in human–robot interaction, we propose new evaluation tools specially tailored to assess interaction between robots and older people

Highest prevalence of vitamin D inadequacy in institutionalized women compared with noninstitutionalized women: a case-control study.

The reduced capacity of older skin to synthesize vitamin D(3) under the influence of ultraviolet light makes older persons at risk of vitamin D deficiency. The risk could even be increased in institutionalized persons owing to their lower sunshine exposure. It has been reported that an inadequate vitamin D level is associated with secondary hyperparathyroidism, increased bone turnover, and bone loss, which increase fracture risk. The objective of this study was to assess the prevalence of inadequate serum vitamin D levels in institutionalized, postmenopausal, osteoporotic women. Assessment of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] was performed in 445 institutionalized, osteoporotic women from nine countries (Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain and UK). For each institutionalized woman, three age-matched, noninstitutionalized, osteoporotic controls were also included. Four cutoffs of 25(OH)D inadequacy were fixed: less than 80, less than 75, less than 50 and less than 30 nmol/l. Mean age was 79.7 years (standard deviation [SD] = 5.8) for the institutionalized women and 79.5 years (SD = 5.5) for the noninstitutionalized women (p = 0.45). Significantly fewer institutionalized women received vitamin D supplements (13.2 vs 24.0%; p < 0.0001). In women without vitamin D supplements, the level of 25(OH)D was significantly lower in institutionalized women (56.9 [SD = 23.9] nmol/l) compared with noninstitutionalized women (63.2 [SD = 22.0] nmol/l; p < 0.0001). In institutionalized women (without vitamin D supplements), the prevalence of 25(OH)D inadequacy was 10.4, 41.2, 80.3 and 84.2% when considering cutoffs of 80, 75, 50 and 30 nmol/l, respectively. In the control group, the prevalence was 2.7, 22.9, 74.4 and 81.7%, respectively. The prevalence of vitamin D inadequacy was significantly higher in institutionalized women when considering the 75, 50 and 30 nmol/l cutoffs but not when considering the 80 nmol/l cutoff. This study highlights a high prevalence of vitamin D inadequacy in institutionalized, osteoporotic women. Compared with age-matched osteoporotic controls, the prevalence of severe vitamin D inadequacy was substantially more important in institutionalized women. We believe that a greater awareness of the importance of vitamin D inadequacy is needed in order to address this public health problem