Falls and quality of life: associated with emotional aspects in elderlies from the community

INTRODUCTION: Falls are considered a public health problem due to its prevalence and consequences that may affect the elderly's quality of life (QL). AIM: Analyze the relationship between falling by accident and the elderly QL. METHODOLOGY: This is a cross-sectional study based on the population in Goiânia, with 914 elderlies of the community. The collected data addressed socio economical and demographical factors and falls; the QL was evaluated by the SF-36 questionnaire. The associations were analyzed by the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests. RESULTS: The prevalence of falls that was found was 34.7%, being superior in the female gender (38.0%) and the age group was over 80 years old (45.4%). The analysis showed no significant difference in relation to the average of most of the domain of the SF-36 according to the occurrence of falls. But in the association of falls, QL and age group, the average for the emotional aspects (EA) was 72.9 years old for fallers and 84.6 years old for non-fallers (p = 0.047). CONCLUSION: In this study, one can observe the high prevalence of falls, mainly in the female and older groups (80 years of age and up). As to the relationship between QL and falls, the fallers presented a lower average only in the EA domain. Therefore, it is suggested that new studies could potentially investigate the relationship between factors in these two areas, emphasizing the use of the qualitative methodology to portray the impact of falls in the QL of this population.