At-Home Exercise Helps After Hip Break: study

Simple at-home exercises could help seniors regain mobility and independence after recovering from a broken hip, according to a new study.

Participants who followed the six-month home exercise program showed significant improvements in their ability to get up and around, climb stairs and attend to daily activities, compared to similar seniors who only had typical post-fracture rehab.

"We found that a low-contact, low-support sort of program did significantly improve people's function and mobility six months after they started it," Nancy Latham told Reuters Health.

Latham is the study's lead author from the Health and Disability Research Institute at Boston University.

A broken hip often marks the start of a rapid decline in older people's health.

Latham and her colleagues write in JAMA that previous research has found about half of men and over a third of women are either living in a nursing home or dead two years after breaking their hips.

"We know there is a gap there where people are being left in a poor functional state," Latham said. However, research has also shown that months of intensive outpatient physical therapy improves function, mobility and other outcomes, she added.

"It's good to know that works, but that's not going to be realistic," she said.

To test a more realistic home-based program for helping seniors regain mobility and function, the researchers recruited 232 people aged 60 years old and older from the Boston area.

All had experienced a hip fracture and had been released from a physical rehabilitation program within the past 20 months.

The participants, whose mean age was 78, were then randomly assigned to one of two groups.

One group of 120 was taught a home exercise program during three or four visits from a physical therapist. The exercises focused on realistic daily movements like getting out of a chair and stepping up or down.

The participants were told to do the exercises three times a week for six months. They were also given a DVD of the program.

The comparison group of 112 participants received nutrition education during a home visit and a series of phone calls. They also received nutrition information through the mail.

Everyone was tested for physical performance, mobility and daily activity when they entered the study, at six months and again at nine months.

When they began the program, participants in the exercise group scored an average of 6.2 on a scale that measures physical performance between zero and 12 - with higher scores indicating better function. The nutrition group similarly scored an average of six at the start.

At six months, the exercise group participants scored an average of 7.2, compared to an average of 6.2 among those in the nutrition group.