Authors: Julieann Brennan nee Saunders Antony Johansen John Butler Mike Stone Peter Richmond Sarah Jones Ronan A Lyons
Publish Date: 2003/04/30
Volume: 14, Issue: 6, Pages: 515-519
Abstract
Fracture prevention strategies will be most costeffective if targeted on groups of frail elderly people who are at particularly high risk of falls and fractures Elderly people living in care homes are one potential target population but fracture incidence in this setting remains poorly defined in many countries We used the All Wales Injury Surveillance System AWISS in a populationbased study of people aged over 65 years living in the city of Cardiff We linked a postcodebased register of all sheltered accommodation and all residential and nursing homes in the city with injury data from Cardiffs single Accident and Emergency Department Cardiff has 47700 residents aged over 65 years with 1918 40 living in residential or nursing homes and 1868 39 in sheltered accommodation In 1999 we identified a total of 1305 fractures including 366 hip fractures giving a crude fracture incidence of 274/1000 per year and 77/1000 per year respectively Care home residents suffered 213 fractures 95 of which were of the hip giving a crude fracture incidence of 1111/1000 per year and 495/1000 per year respectively People living in sheltered accommodation suffered 94 fractures including 28 at the hip giving a crude fracture incidence of 514/1000 per year and 153/1000 per year respectively People in care homes and sheltered accommodation tend to be older than those living in the community and we adjusted for this by calculating age and genderstandardized relative ratios for each setting Compared with the community dwelling population care home residents had an overall fracture risk of 29 95 CI 25–33 and a hip fracture risk of 33 95 CI 26–42 People in sheltered accommodation had a total fracture risk of 17 95 CI 14–21 and a hip fracture risk of 16 95 CI 11–24 Such figures support the potential costeffectiveness of strategies that seek to prevent fractures in care homes and sheltered accommodation and are of special interest to those planning intervention studies in these settings
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