More reason to avoid a nasty fall: stroke prevention

Falls are a leading cause of hospitalization, especially for the older set. From Reuters Health, this study makes a lot of sense.

Broken hip tied to increased risk of stroke:

The study out of Taiwan found that patients with a broken hip had more than a 50 percent increased risk of having a stroke within a year of their injury compared to similar patients with no fractures. ...

"It is known that the risk of hip fracture is high in those with strokes. We thought that was because strokes lead to falls and bone loss," Dr. Steven Cummings of the University of California, San Francisco, told Reuters Health in an e-mail.

"This new study makes me think that both hip fractures and strokes are partly due to an underlying cause of aging," added Cummings, who was not involved in the current research but recently led a separate study of hip fractures.