Older Women Who Sleep Less Fall More

Older women who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to fall, researchers say. The new study included 3,000 women. All were 70 or older. Researchers looked at how much time they spent sleeping when they were in bed. It compared these numbers with the risk of falls. The women slept an average of 6.8 hours a night. Typically, they were awake in bed 77 minutes before sleeping. Most women fell once or less during the year of the study. But nearly 1 in 5 fell twice or more. Multiple falls were most common for women who slept five hours or less each night. HealthDay News wrote about the study September 8. It appeared in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.