Falls due to stroke

BMJ 1995;311:1022 (14 October)

Letters

Falls due to stroke

Drug treatment and mental status of study patients is unclear

EDITOR,--Anne Forster and John Young's study on falls due tostroke¹ would be more useful if it had addressed some of theother important issues--for example, a considerable proportionof the falls reported could have been due to concomitant useof prescribed psychotropic or hypnotic drugs or even alcoholconsumption. Such use is not reported in the study, and readersremain unsure whether the researchers looked at this.

Cognitive impairment is an important contributor to falls amongelderly people, but no mention is made of how many people inthe study had cognitive impairment or, indeed, of what partit may have played in the self reporting of physical comorbidity.

Lastly, the authors report that there were no differences between"fallers" and "non-fallers" in respect of mental state but donot describe how mental state was assessed. It would perhaps. . . [Full text of this article]

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