In a new study, researchers from the University of Michigan explained why even though the brain realizes a fall is about to take place, the muscles do nothing to prevent it.
Everyone stumbles, falls, loses balance, but for the elderly falls can be life-threatening. In most cases, when older people fall, they dislocate their hip. Among these, 80 percent die within a year. Many times, though the brain senses a fall before it happens, the muscles fail to respond to the signal.
In a new study, researchers of the University of Michigan found that a proper understanding of this time interval between when the brain senses a fall and the muscles finally respond could help explain why so many older people suffer these serious falls.
For the study, researchers used an electroencephalogram to analyze the electrical responses in the brain before and during a fall. The study was done on younger people and the scientists found that though many areas in the brain sense and respond to a fall, there is a time lag in the response.
"We're using an EEG in a way others don't, to look at what's going on inside the brain," lead researcher Daniel Ferris said in a press statement. "We were able to determine what parts of the brain first identify when you are losing your balance during walking."
Ferris and his team found that people sense falling better when both their feet are on the ground as it makes it easier to determine where the ground is in relation to the body. According to Ferris, further studies need to be conducted comparing the responses of younger people and the elderly to falls and whether older people sense a fall too late, which results in them experiencing bad falls. If the mechanism behind older people sensing a fall can be determined, it could be used by pharmaceuticals to help in preventing such falls.
The study, "Loss of balance during balance beam walking elicits a broadly distributed theta band electro-cortical response," was published online in the Journal of Neurophysiology.
