Fall is in the air
Here are two scary stats for you:
Seventy percent of people older than 70 take blood pressure meds. Yes, you read that right: 7 out of 10. More than 30 million men and women.
And…25 percent of older people who fall and fracture a hip die within a year. Eighty percent are left with mobility problems severe enough that they are unable to walk a city block.
Why am I passing along this depressing information? Usually I’m all upbeat and full of beat-the-clock energy and brimming with just-do-it spirit. It’s not that I’m feeling grouchy today. Au contraire. Things are going very well for me on my latest counterclockwise journey (my quest to dance in The Nutcracker this holiday season). But I feel compelled to comment for two reasons:
First, these two equally depressing, seemingly unrelated health statistics are, in fact, closely related. People who take blood-pressure-lowering medication are at significantly increased risk for serious falls. This according to a study published last April in JAMA Internal Medicine. (Other drugs commonly prescribed for older people including anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs and sleep medications can, in the words of a Yale geriatrician who studies falls, “directly affect your balance.”)
And second (here’s where I switch back to my just-do-it self): This is AVOIDABLE. (“This” being both the taking of such medications and the falling.) Why do 30 million older people require medication to lower their blood pressure? Elevated blood pressure is not a natural consequence of aging. It is a natural consequence of an out-of-shape heart and stiffened arteries…which are not a natural consequence of aging. They are a natural consequence of lack of exercise, poor diet, obesity, smoking – the decisions we make (or don’t make) and live by every day. And the decisions we make today at age 40 or 50 or 60 WILL have consequences when we are 70 or 80 or older.
Why not have those be good consequences?
2 comments
so glad you brought this subject up, Lauren. Last year I had to persuade my 90-year-old mom’s doctor to stop routinely prescribing ambien (a known culprit in falls and much more) and other unnecessary sleeping and anti anxiety meds for her. With older folks, too many docs are content to just medicate the symptoms without addressing the causes or potential dangerous drug interactions. After she discontinued those meds (I threw out thousands of pills), her falls stopped. My mom’s sedentary lifestyle and other issues have caught up with her and she’s now unable to do any but the most basic of exercises: walking, with a walker. So she continues to take the blood pressure meds, which have the side effect of urinary urgency, which means when she gets up, groggily, in the middle of the night to visit the bathroom, she’s at risk of falling. Other potential side effects include memory loss, which can be hard to distinguish from its natural causes. My mom’s generation generally didn’t appreciate the need for exercise, and while it’s mostly (but not entirely!) too late for her, I hope your readers will take your book’s lessons (literally) to heart. The real payoff will occur years later.
Thanks for the show-don’t-tell, Brett. For those of us who’ve seen the overmedication of our grandparents and parents, the message is really really clear.
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