Dr. Ruth Taylor-Piliae Awarded Grant to Study Older Adult Fall Prevention

April 14, 2017

According to the National Council on Aging, one quarter of Americans aged 65 and over fall each year. That translates to an older adult seeking treatment in an emergency room for a fall every 11 seconds. The financial toll for such accidents is expected to increase to $67.7 billion by 2020, as the health care industry seeks to provide cost-effective, competent care to an aging demographic. A new research study at the University of Arizona College of Nursing. Ruth Taylor-Piliae, PhD, RN, FAHA, looks to allay this crisis with a $10,000 grant from the Arizona Area Health Education Center (AzAHEC). She will determine if adding a low-cost balance exercise program to A Matter of Balance (AMOB), a nationwide eight-week structured group intervention that emphasizes practical strategies to reduce fear of falling and increase activity levels, will prevent falls.

Ruth E Taylor-Piliae , PhD, RN, FAHA

The curriculum for “A Matter of Balance is designed for managing older adult’s concerns about fear of falling and what to do if they fall, such as how to get up safely from the floor,” said Taylor-Piliae. “But they don’t do specific exercises to help an older adult improve their balance.” That’s where Dr. Taylor-Piliae’s study comes in. Her team members of the Arizona Center on Aging,  includes M. Jane Mohler, PhD, associate professor, UA College of Medicine – Tucson and the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, and Nima Toosizadah, PhD, assistant professor, UA Colleges of Medicine –Tucson and Biomedical Engineering, will integrate its Dual-Task Balance Challenge (DTBC) intervention into the program. Designed to strengthen study participants’ sense of balance, the DTBC involves a series of ankle-reaching tasks that are both physically and cognitively challenging.

Partnering with El Rio Community Health Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing compassionate care to underserved populations, the study will enroll 24 community-dwelling older adults (60 years and older) who are at high fall risk. A 15-minute DTBC regimen (twice a week for four weeks) will be added to the participants’ AMOB training regimen. “By adding this very simple low-tech intervention to the existing curriculum, we hope to enhance both balance and attention and thus reduce the risk of falling,” said Taylor-Piliae.

“If we find that adding this intervention to the existing AMOB improves people’s balance, then we can test it further by seeking federal funding to test this on a wider scale,” said Taylor-Piliae. The ultimate goal would be to integrate the Dual-Task Balance Challenge intervention into the AMOB nationwide program. Taylor-Piliae points out that research doesn’t necessarily have to be high-tech to be innovative. In fact, the challenge’s low-tech structure makes it easy to be widely and quickly disseminated to AMOB’s network of volunteer lay leaders and master trainers.

A member of the Executive Leadership Council for the statewide Arizona Falls Prevention Coalition, Taylor-Piliae has a long-standing interest in fall prevention. In her last research project, she examined the effects of Tai Chi exercise on physical function, fall rates and quality of life among older stroke survivors. She garnered evidence that participants in the Tai Chi group had significantly fewer falls after the intervention. “My long-term research goal is to enhance community-based programs with readily accessible evidence-based solutions for preventing falls,” she said.