Coming down is the dangerous part, roughly three times more so than going up, and stair falls cause worse injuries than falls on flat ground. But the most useful thing I found is this: home safety changes have strong evidence behind them for people already at higher risk of falling, and strong evidence of no…
Getting on and off the toilet is one of the riskiest things your parent does in the bathroom, and it is the part almost nobody plans for. In the CDC’s national injury data, about one in seven bathroom injuries happened while standing up from, sitting down on, or using the toilet. Raising the seat and…
Two things matter in a kitchen, and most advice only covers one. The first is fire and burns, where cooking is the leading cause of fire injuries in older adults and unattended cooking is the leading cause of kitchen fires. The second gets almost no attention: a kitchen that has quietly become too hard to…
No trial has ever tested it. That is the honest answer, and it surprised me. What does exist is a study of 651 people injured badly enough to enter a UK trauma registry after falling from a stair lift, with a mortality rate of 15.7%. So the benefit is assumed and unmeasured, while one specific…
By Simon Peter Lokomo, MPH — Public HealthLast reviewed: July 2026 Probably it contributes, but nobody has proven it. People with hearing loss do fall more often, and that pattern holds across millions of people. Whether the hearing loss is causing the falls is a harder question. In 2025 a trial found that giving people…
By Simon Peter Lokomo, MPH — Public HealthLast reviewed: July 2026 Match the device to how much support your parent actually needs. A cane helps balance and takes about a tenth of the weight off one sore leg. A walker carries real weight and needs both hands. A rollator, the four-wheeled kind with a seat,…
By Simon Peter Lokomo, MPH — Public HealthLast reviewed: July 2026 For someone living at home, no. The trials found no benefit, and if anything a slight increase in fractures. For someone in a nursing home, probably a small reduction, though the effect shrinks to nothing when the weakest studies are removed. And in nearly…
By Simon Peter Lokomo, MPH — Public HealthLast reviewed: July 2026 Do Bifocal and Multifocal Glasses Increase Fall Risk? What Older Adults Need to Know Yes, and by more than most people expect. Older adults who wear bifocals, trifocals or varifocals are roughly twice as likely to fall as those wearing single-vision lenses, because looking…
By Simon Peter Lokomo, MPH — Public Health Last reviewed: July 2026 How to Get Up After a Fall: A Safe Step-by-Step Guide for Older Adults Do not rush to stand. Stay still for a minute, then check for injury before moving at all. If you hit your head, or anything hurts sharply when you…
By Simon Peter Lokomo, MPH — Public HealthLast reviewed: July 2026 Nighttime Bathroom Falls in Older Adults The walk to the bathroom at 3 am stacks several risks on top of each other at once. The person is half asleep, the room is dark, blood pressure drops sharply on standing after hours lying down, and…