Taking a tumble isn't always deadly. But after road traffic accidents, it's the most common cause of death by accidental injury. Deaths from falls were dropping until recently – at least in higher-income countries like the US and the UK.
But since the 2010s, they’ve slowly crept back up, from 11 to 13 deaths per 100,000 between 2009 and 2021, according to one 2025 study across 59 countries.
Older people appear to be the most affected. In the US, for example, the number of over-85s dying after falls has tripled just since 2000.
Meanwhile, in England, the number of over-65s admitted to Accident & Emergency after a fall has climbed steadily from 185,000 in 2011 to 223,000 in 2021, suggesting that falls are happening more often. Whether they’re also more deadly isn’t clear.
While researchers are aware of this trend, the causes are still debated. Some scientists put it down partly to improvements in reporting.
But it could also be related to increasing use of prescription drugs referred to as ‘fall-risk increasing drugs’ (FRIDs), that heighten the probability of falls in older adults by causing sedation, dizziness or hypotension, often increasing fall rates by 1.5 times.
FRIDs cover a broad group of medicines used to treat everything from high blood pressure and heart disease to depression, anxiety and insomnia.
Writing recently in a health policy journal, public health expert Dr Thomas Farley pinpointed benzodiazepines, gabapentinoids and antidepressants as some of the most worrying FRID categories, both because they are strongly linked to falls and seeing ‘surging use’.
Many older people take multiple drugs, including combinations of these drugs, and it’s thought that this ‘polypharmacy’ may increase fall risk.
Doctors complain that stopping prescriptions, however, particularly for drugs prescribed by a range of specialists, can be complicated and time-consuming.
And there’s currently little evidence to suggest that it helps – results from a few small studies suggest that reducing prescriptions has little impact on falls.
Whether this means we need more evidence, or that something else is to blame, remains to be seen.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Joshua Morris, St Helier) 'Why are more older people dying after falls?'
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