This year’s well attended Falls and Postural Stability Conference was held in Wembley, London. BGS member Mary Ni Lochlainn reports back.
The first session at this year’s BGS Falls and Postural Stability Conference was opened by Professor Alice Nieuwbower, from University of Leuven, Belgium, who discussed falls in the context of Parkinson’s Disease (PD).
Patients with PD are twice as likely to fall, compared to healthy older adults. It seems wobbling is a major factor here with ‘sway’ more predictive of falls than ‘gait speed’ in this population. Sway-metrics (probably not as much fun as they sound) show increased sway in patients taking levodopa, leading to a therapeutic challenge for clinicians.