Depression leads to more falls
The study points to a complex relationship between mental illness, a sense of balance and falling in older people. Image: yuri_arcurs/iStockphoto A new NeuRA study has found that people suffering from depression are more likely to fall, pointing to a complex relationship between mental illness, a sense of balance, and falling in older people.Falls are a major public health issue across the world as falling is a frequent cause of accidental death in older people.Prof Stephen Lord at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) and colleagues studied a population of people 65 years of age and older in Taiwan.“We’ve known that depression and falls are connected in older people for some time, but we were never able to determine whether depression itself or anti-depressants increase the rate of falling”, says Lord.“But anti-depressants are not commonly taken by the people we studied and so for the first time we were able to measure lifestyle factors,...