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Table 3 Eligibility criteria for key question 2

From: Fall prevention interventions for older community-dwelling adults: systematic reviews on benefits, harms, and patient values and preferences

Criteria

Inclusion

Exclusion

Population

Adults living in the community, aged 65 or older; when looking at importance of outcome of residential status, population may be awaiting or newly admitted to residential care

Studies recruiting adults < 65 years will be included if ≥80% of the participants are aged 65 or older, if participants’ mean age minus one standard deviation is ≥ 65 years, or if results are provided for those ≥ 65 years.

Family members or caregivers may serve as participants on behalf of an older adult with cognitive impairment or otherwise unable to understand the study procedures.

Studies with recruitment based exclusively on one or more specific diagnoses. Excluded populations include, but are not limited to:

• Stroke

• Parkinson’s (neurodegenerative conditions)

• Severe dementia

• Long-term care facilities (unless newly admitted)

• Housebound

• Severe frailty (with protocol for addressing falls or for falls risk assessment in place)

• Impaired balance (severe)

• Community-dwelling and receiving long-term, intensive nursing care (unless newly acquired need)

• Visual impairment (severe)

• Hospitalized patients (unless with acute fracture or injury from fall)

• Confirmed vitamin D deficiency

Exposure(s)

• Experience with critical outcome(s) of interest, or

• Exposure to clinical scenario(s) or information about potential critical outcome(s) and/or estimate(s) of effect on outcomes from falls prevention interventions, or

• No experience or exposure to information about critical outcomes, but authors are soliciting probability trade-offs (e.g., number of adverse events from interventions to make one fewer fall worthwhile) or ratings of different potential critical outcomes

Focus of study is on consideration of possible, or assessment of experienced, outcomes related to falls prevention that are considered critical by the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (see outcomes Table 1). For fractures, the main three “sub-outcomes” considered for this KQ will be “any fracture attributed to a fall”, “any fracture” and “a single hip fracture”.

 

Comparison(s)

a) Experience or exposure to scenarios or information about a different critical outcome (e.g., falls vs. any fracture, hip vs. “any fracture”)

b) Healthy state without critical outcome (for utility studies only)

c) No comparison (for utility studies only, if information from comparisons a or b are not available for a particular outcome)

 

Outcomes

a) Utility values/weights for the potential outcomes/health states

b) Non-utility, quantitative information about relative importance of different outcomes, e.g., rating scales using ordinal or interval variables, ranking; preference for or against interventions [attendance, intentions, or acceptance] or preferred type of intervention based on different outcome risk descriptions, strength of associations between outcome ratings and behaviors or intentions for falls prevention interventions

c) Qualitative information indicating relative importance between outcomes

Data must relate to the outcomes considered critical to the Task Force (Table 1); for studies measuring the health state utility of a fracture or those residing in residential homes/facilities, attribution to a fall will be prioritized, as possible

Outcome groupings (a) to (c) above will be included in a hierarchical manner

 

Timing

Follow-up duration: any or none

 

Setting

Any

 

Study Design and Publication Status

Any cross-sectional or longitudinal quantitative or qualitative study design using the methods described below:

Methods:

a) Utility values/weights for health states measured directly using time trade-off*, standard gamble**, visual analogue scales, conjoint analysis with choice experiments or probability trade-offs

b) Utility values/weights measured or estimated indirectly, e.g., a person’s health status is elicited along several dimensions using a questionnaire (e.g., EuroQol-5D), then a preference for that particular health state is derived, based on values obtained from previous populations

c) Surveys or questionnaires with questions providing non-utility, quantitative information about relative importance of different outcomes; may be investigating decision aids

d) Qualitative studies providing information indicating relative importance between benefits and harms

Study design groupings (c) and (d) will be included only if insufficient data is available from (a) and (b)

• Commentaries, opinion, editorials, case reports, and reviews

• Studies only published/available as conference proceedings or other grey literature (e.g., government reports), unless information on study design (e.g., eligibility criteria, participant characteristics, presentation of scenarios) is available (accessible online or via author contact) and sufficient to assess methodological quality.

Language

English or French

 

Publication date

2000-present

 
  1. *Time trade-off measures the value placed on attributes of a commodity by requiring individuals to choose between different scenarios, where in each scenario the commodity in question has varying levels of different attributes
  2. **Standard gamble approaches require that respondents choose between a lifetime in a certain health state or a gamble between different health states, whereas time trade-off requires respondents to choose between living for a period in less than perfect health, as opposed to a shorter period in perfect health