Epidemiology of fall and its socioeconomic risk factors in community-dwelling Korean elderly

Abstract

Although falls in older people are a major public health problem globally, to date there are scarce reports on socioeconomic risk factors for falls. The aim of the present study was to investigate the epidemiology of fall, its associated socioeconomic risk factors and relative importance among community-dwelling Korean elderly. Secondary analysis of national survey data with 31,684 community-dwelling Korean elderly was performed. Eleven socioeconomic factors (age, gender, household type, marital status, education level, current occupation, past occupation, income, wealth, number of children, and relationship satisfaction) were selected for analysing their associations with the epidemiology of fall through complex sample analysis and logistic regressions. Results showed that 15.9%~25.1% of community-dwelling Korean elderly experienced fall yearly. The groups with significantly higher fall risks were identified as older aged, being female, not married or widowed, less educated, unemployed, and having lower relationship satisfaction. Gender (adjusted odds ratio-AOR = 1.548) and relationship satisfaction (AOR = 1.276) were the utmost important fall risk factors, indicating being older female with lower relationship satisfaction were the foremost socioeconomic characteristics for risk of falling. These findings could contribute to better understanding of the socioeconomic fall risk profiles among Korean elderly and effective strategies for fall prevention.

Fig 1. Flow of the overall data analysis process.