Balance in Healthy Elderly and Elderly Diabetics

One source of falls in the elderly may be an inability to sufficiently adjust to transient postural perturbations or slips. Identifying useful predictors of fall potential, as well as factors that affect the ability of an individual to detect a movement of the standing support surface may provide insight into postural stability and methods to increase stability in elders. To do this, acceleration thresholds to short, precise, lateral platform translations and the resultant psychophysical responses of adults with early Type 2 diabetes to age-matched controls and young adults were measured. Through this study a marked decrease in perception of very small moves due to aging and diabetic neuropathy was measured. This loss of motion perception could have a detrimental effect on postural control mechanisms of these individuals. This work shows that the higher prevalence of falls in the elderly and elderly diabetics may be due to decreased perceptual ability, slower nerve conduction velocities, and slowing reaction times. These factors are compounded by larger amounts of imparted energy needed by elder and diabetic adults for detection of a slipping event .