Document Type

Research Poster

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

•30-60% community dwelling older adults fall each year, which is the leading cause of injury, death, and traumatic hospital admissions in the elderly.1 This costs the U.S. health care system $20-30 billion per year.2 Currently used older adult self-report measures demonstrate poor responsiveness3, thus failing to detect a decline in function on early enough for preventative physical therapy intervention.

•The Vestibular Activities of Daily Living Scale (VADL) is a self-report measure developed to determine activity & participation restrictions in patients with vestbular dysfunction. This scale clearly delineates important tasks and categories of independence, which would be applicable to the assessment of older adult fall risk and functional decline.

•Assessing some basic psychometric properties of a modified version of the VADL (mVADL) to the examination of older adult balance is required before this tool can be used confidently in the clinic.

•In regards to statistical calculations for outcome measures, typically the mean is used to determine the average value to represent the participant scores, however, the mVADL is scored using the median. Using the median score reduces the amount of outliers from the normative data.

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