Falls among the elderly account for 20% of all incident reports in hospitals and this has triggered debate on the state of care of bedridden patients.In this regard,as well as being an important issue in medical risk management,clarifying the risk factors for falls and taking measures to prevent them will contribute to the objectives of curing diseases and improving the quality of life of patients by ensuring that treatment is continuous,and reduce medical costs.In this study,we focused on carcinoma patients being treated with anticancer drugs,and examined the relevance of these 2 factors to fall incidence.First,we conducted an investigation of fall incident reports and the associated clinical records,and examined the medicines prescribed to the patients concerned.The risk of falls was analyzed by means of case-control studies or the case crossover method.About 40% of all cases of falls involved cancer patients,though such patients accounted for only around 20% of all inpatients.This made the unadjusted odds ratio for the risk of falling in cancer patients 3.22 which tended to be higher than that in patients with other diseases.Analysis of the drug-related fall risk revealed that the unadjusted odds ratio for risk of anticancer drug use in falls was 2.15,indicating that this was a relevant risk.
In conclusion,our findings suggest that extra attention should be paid to cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy in order to prevent fall accidents.