Fall Injuries: An Important Preventable Cause of Trauma

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Fall is one of the most common causes of major injuries and responsible for many hospital admissions in Iran (1, 2). Falling may happen at any age, but children and the aged people are at higher risk for it. Approximately 47000 children fall to their death annually, but hundreds of thousands more sustain less serious injuries from a fall (3). Falls represent the third leading cause of death in children and are responsible for 5.9% of childhood deaths due to trauma (4). Generally, death due to falls is resulted from head injury (5). Falls in children tend to be from terraces, tables, windows, and trees, and most frequently have a tendency to occur in homes, followed by playgrounds and schoolyards (6). Non-occupational falls from ladders and scaffolds have increasing incidence with increasing age. One-fifth of the cases result in hospitalization (7). Commonly, falls in the elderly occur during daily living activities. Older adults are five times more likely to be hospitalized due to falls than to injuries from other causes (8). Personal factors such as gait disturbance and muscle weakness, osteoarthritis, visual deficit, medications and cognitive impairment are the main causes of ground-level and stair falls, but such environmental elements as poor lighting and absence of handrails may enhance the frequency (4). In our country, Iran, injuries are responsible for most of YLD (Years Lived with Disability) in the population older than 80 years. This is most notably due to falls, and is often worsened by osteoporo-sis (9). Fall may occur in different places and for different reasons. In occupational settings, the most frequent type of accidents is fall from a height (10). In most cases (like ladder injuries), ignoring safety precautions result in fall. For example, fall from walnut trees is responsible for significant mortality and morbidity amongst those engaged in agricultural activities, and every year many victims of falling from walnut and almond trees are admitted to our trauma center during harvest season. The same can be seen in those involved in high altitude working activities e.g. construction workers. Almost in all cases some evidence of poor safety measures are observed. On the other hand, there are occasional cases of fall for such accidents as defective …