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Home Safety for Older Adults
What are you doing to stay healthy? Chances are you're already keeping an eye on your weight and blood pressure, trying to eat right, and working to stay fit. But have you taken a look at what's inside your medicine cabinet lately? Have you tested your smoke alarms to see if they still work? Have you had your vision or balance tested recently?
Taking steps to make your home safe can be just as important to your chance of living a long and healthy life as watching your cholesterol levels. Accidents at home rank among the leading causes of injury and death in the United States. The chance of dying because of an accident at home begins rising at age 65 and then jumps significantly at age 75 (see "Unsafe at home," below). Even those who survive a home accident often find their lives changed dramatically, sometimes losing their independence. One hip fracture, for instance, may be all that stands between you and a nursing home.
Fortunately, it is possible to prevent most home injuries by understanding how they happen and taking steps to avoid them. Accidents at home tend to occur because of a combination of intrinsic factors — physiological qualities such as poor eyesight or insufficient blood pressure — and extrinsic factors such as poor lighting in a stairway or an inadequately grounded electrical circuit.
This report will show you how to implement a comprehensive home-safety plan. You'll learn how to address or compensate for the typical physiological changes that occur with age. You'll find out about the most common types of home accidents and how to avoid them, or how to administer first aid if they occur. Because details can sometimes be overwhelming, this report also contains a list of the top five things you can do to keep yourself safe at home and provides a room-by-room inventory of top safety concerns. Remember that health, like charity, begins at home.
Aging and accidents
You change as you grow older, and not just in the most obvious ways of gaining wisdom and developing wrinkles. Slower reaction times, diminished ability to see and hear, and altered metabolism, among other changes, may leave you more vulnerable to an accident at home. Yet these changes may come on so gradually that you do not notice them until it is too late — when you've already had an accident.
To further complicate matters, your physiological age does not always correspond with how old you are. For instance, one 75-year-old man may be playing tennis every day, while another requires a walker. This variability in physiological aging has been documented by a large-scale epidemiologic study, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, launched in 1958 by the National Institute on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health. This ongoing study has followed the health of more than 1,000 people, ranging in age from 20 to 90, and looked at the effects of aging on the brain, heart, and other organ systems. The researchers have found that aging is not a predictable process. Instead, it depends on your family history (genes), your medical history, and your lifestyle choices: what you eat, how often you exercise, and whether you see a doctor regularly. If you are a 50-year-old who has always exercised outdoors, for example, you may have the lungs and heart of a 40-year-old, but the wrinkled skin of a 60-year-old. Even so, it is possible to identify the types of changes that typically occur with age and how these might affect your safety at home.
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Author Info: Harvard Health Publications
Date Last Reviewed: 04-01-2005 Published Date: 01-23-2007 Copyright © 2008 by President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. |
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