Examination of validity of fall risk assessment items for screening high fall risk elderly among the healthy community-dwelling Japanese population

We aimed to examine the validity of fall risk assessment items for the healthy community-dwelling elderly Japanese population. Participants were 1122 healthy elderly individuals aged 60 years and over (380 males and 742 females). The percentage who had experienced a fall was 15.8%. This study used fall experience and 50 fall risk assessment items representing the five risk factors (symptoms of falling, physical function, disease and physical symptom, environment, and behavior and character), as we described before. The accuracy of predicting fall experience from the total score or each risk factor score was examined by discriminant analysis. The percentage correctly distinguishing the faller from the total score was 14.4%, and that from the five risk factor scores was 39.7%. This percentage, when using each risk factor score as an independent variable, was 42.5% (symptom of falling), 0.6% (physical function score), 0.6% (disease and physical symptoms score), 0.0% (environment score), and 1.1% (behavior and character score), respectively. The best predictor of fall experience of the community-dwelling elderly was the "symptom of falling" score. For fall risk assessment of the community-dwelling elderly, both of screening of fall risk level and assessing risk profile comprehensively is important. © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved