Screening for Phobia of Falling in the Elderly: Validity and Feasibility of a Self-administered Questionnaire

Context : The phobia of falling strongly contributes to the frailty of the elderly, and plays a key role in falls occuring and their deleterious effect. It concerns a big part of seniors living at home, fell before or not, and frequently leads to a restriction of their mobility. When the phobia of falling occurs, the fear of falling down takes an excessive scope, it is associated with anxious reactions when seniors dread the risk, and leads them to avoid these situations reducing their mobility. This reduction of activities contributes to the premature decline of physical capacities, worsens social life, increases the falling and institutionalization risk. However, there is no specific tools for the detection of seniors falling phobia, enabling us to turn patients towards a therapeutic and diagnostical adapted care. A detecting self-questionnaire was thus designed by the research geriatric team after an analysis of the literature and half-directive interviews with a representative sample of the target population.

Objectives : The main objective of this study is to evaluate the validity of a self-questionnaire so as to detect falling phobic seniors living at home. The optimal threshold of the questionnaire score, obtained from a receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve), will let us evaluate its concordance compared to the gold standard, formed by DSM-IV criteria for specific phobia. The results of the questionnaire will be kept secret while the study occurs. The secondary objectives will be to control the feasibility of the self-questionnaire detecting phobia of falling, the validity of internal structure and external construction by the exploration of its correlation with other close psychological and physical health measures.

Design : A 1 year prospective monocentric observational study is led with seniors attending geriatric day hospital at the Bretonneau hospital (APHP, Paris). While the same day hospital, all eligible patients will have a current evaluation of cares adapted to their admission causes. These patients will fill out the self-questionnaire detecting phobia, designed by the research geriatric team. The final clinical diagnostic of phobia of falling will be disconfirmed or affirmed from DSM-IV-TR (TR stands for text revision) criteria. At the end of the day hospital, an adapted care to their pathologies will be suggested to all the patients, according to usual practice.