Original title: The global burden of falls: global, regional and national estimates of morbidity and mortality from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017
Researchers estimated deaths and injuries from falls in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. They used hospital records to estimate which injuries people suffered, including fractures. In 2017, falls caused about 696,000 deaths and nearly 36 million years of healthy life lost to death or disability. Even though age-adjusted rates of falls and injuries declined since 1990, disability rates rose with age.
Imagine keeping track of a whole town’s kitchen accidents over many years. Some people die, while others recover or live with injuries that limit what they can do. In this paper, the town is the world’s population, the accidents are falls, and the records help estimate both deaths and time lived with disability.
Falls affect people across the world, and their harm is not measured by deaths alone: injuries can also cause years of disability. These estimates show where the burden falls and why prevention and access to care matter.
The abstract reports estimates across countries and years, but does not describe how complete or comparable the underlying records were, or how uncertainty varied between places. It does not identify specific causes of falls or show which prevention strategies work. The findings quantify burden; they do not establish what interventions would reduce it.
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The global burden of falls: global, regional and national estimates of morbidity and mortality from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 — Spencer Lewis James, Lydia R Lucchesi, Catherine Bisignano et al. — Injury Prevention — doi:10.1136/injuryprev-2019-043286
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.