Researchers say that women who get more than seven or eight hours of sleep each night are less likely to fall than women who get five hours, or less, of sleep each night.
About one-third of adults older than 65 experience a fall each year.
"Falls pose a major health risk among older adults and are a leading cause of mortality [death], morbidity [illness] and premature nursing home placement," according to Newswise reports.
They also found that sleep medications were a factor in falls. Insomnia and disturbed sleep as well as the use of benzodiazepines, which are hypnotic medications used to treat insomnia, are also increasingly common in older adults.
"It is not established whether it is poor sleep or medications used to treat sleep disturbances that explain the increased risk of falls in those who are prescribed such medications," researchers say.
For the study, Katie L. Stone, Ph.D., of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, San Francisco, and colleagues used devices on the wrist and sleep diaries to measure sleep and correlate that to falls in 2,978 women age 70 and older.
The report is in the Sept. 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
