At barely 4 feet, 7 inches tall, Louise Maxmin still zips around like a miniature speed skater - even with a walker, at age 96.
The walker is fairly new, added three years ago after Maxmin fell in a Center City office building. The retired school librarian had turned suddenly to catch an elevator and lost her balance, tumbling headlong onto the marble floor and breaking a bone in her left thigh.
"I could hardly stand the pain," she recalled.
But Maxmin was lucky. Her leg healed after surgery and she was able to go home to her apartment near the Art Museum, where she still lives on her own.
For millions of older adults, however, falling is a major health disaster that leads to disability, loss of independence or early admission to nursing homes, even death. And, as every senior citizen knows, the decline can happen surprisingly fast.
More than one-third of adults older than 65 fall each year, making falls the most common cause of injury, death from injury, and hospital trauma admissions for this age group, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The latest numbers, from 2002, look like this: 12,800 senior deaths from falls, more than 1.6 million emergency-room visits, and 388,000 hospitalizations.
By 2040, given current population trends, the cost of fall injuries among older adults is projected to reach $240 billion a year. "It's enormous," said Ellen D. Sogolow, senior health scientist at the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Yet falls-prevention has not been widely embraced as an important public health issue.
Many older people are reluctant to admit to falling for fear family members will conclude they need a nursing home or assisted living.
And "people just don't think about falling, because what are most older adults treated for? Chronic illnesses like Alzheimer's, hypertension and cancer, and they take a lot of health care money and focus," said Roberta A. Newton, associate director of Temple University's Institute on Aging and a leading authority on falls.
That is slowly changing, as Newton and advocates for the elderly work to get the message out: Falls need not be an inevitable part of aging. Many are preventable.
Earlier this month, at a conference in Philadelphia, the National Council on the Aging unveiled a "Falls Free" campaign to reduce falls through public education on the role of medicines, the home environment, and exercise.
