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COMPARISON OF A STATIC, INDEPENDENT BALANCE PROTOCOL AND THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING BALANCE PROTOCOL ON STABILITY AND RISK OF FALLING IN THE ELDERLY

Abstract

Bert Jacobson1 (FACSM), Jessica Schnaiter-Brasche1, John Sellers2, Taylor Monaghan1, Kimberly Loy1, Carlos Estrada1 1 Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, 2U.S. Army Research Center, Natick, MA

Falls are a leading cause of injury and accidental death among elderly. Most falls are preceded by muscle weakness, poor balance, and vision impairment which contribute to over $35 billion in annual medical costs. PURPOSE: The aime of this study was to compare the effectiveness an independent static balance (ISB) protocol with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) supervised protocol for improving balance in an elderly population. METHODS: Twenty-four ambulatory residents (age 87.1 ±5.6 yr; wt 76.74 ±17.59 kg; ht 163.57 ±7.1 cm) in a community dwelling served as volunteers for the study and were randomly placed in the ISB or NIA group. Pre- and post-tests included assessments of fall risk (FR), overall stability (OS), anterior/posterior (AP) index, and medial and lateral index (MLI) collected using a Biodex Balance System®. Training consisted of 20 minutes, two times per week for 12 weeks. Result data was adjusted based on missed/attended sessions. RESULTS: Analysis yielded improvement of all dependent variables for both groups without any significant differences (p>0.05)between the two groups for any variable. For FR the ISM group improved by 30.4% while the NIA group improved by17.8%. For OS the NIA group improved by 23.6% and the ISB group by 9.8%. For AP the average improvement for the NIA group was 41.0% compared to the ISB group at 18.0%. Similarly, the average improvement ML for the NIA group was 43.9% compared to the ISB group at 17.1%. CONCLUSION: Static balance exercises conducted independently without safety supervision led to similar improvements in balance and fall risk reduction as the highly supervised NIA protocol, thereby indicating that balance and stability can be improved independently without close supervision thus allowing supervisory personnel to tend to other clients or patients.

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