Relationship Between Fear of Falling, Balance Impairment and Functional Mobility in Community Dwelling Elderly

Abstract

Fear of falling in elderly is a major cause of loss of independence, which has an effect on the physicalfunction in them. The focus of the study is to find whether a relationship exist among fear of falling, balanceimpairment and functional mobility in the community dwelling elderly people. The sample consisted of 52community dwelling elderly people of age between 65 years to 90 years (mean = 71.96, SD± 5.92). Fear offalling was measured using falls efficacy scale (FES), balance was measured using Berg balance scale (BBS)and functional mobility was assessed using the Timed Up and Go test (TUG). The data was analyzed usingPearson co-efficient of correlation to examine the relationship between FES, BBS and TUG test and with ttest.The correlation co-efficient between fall efficacy and balance performance wais –0.97 (p £ 0.01) andcorrelation coefficient between fall efficacy and TUG was 0.95 (p£0.05). This study concluded that there wasa significant association between the fall efficacy, the balance performance and the functional mobility in theelderly people. This relationship has an important implication for the development of the rehabilitationprograms that aim to improve the balance confidence and diminish its impact on function in elderly people.

Keywords

• Balance
• Falls