This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: The negative results in the study by Ms van Schoor and colleagues¹ underscore the importance of adherence in measuring the effectiveness of hip protectors.

Although the authors extended the follow-up duration to address the inadequate number of study participants, a larger issue arises from the authors' ambitious risk reduction estimate of 75% that they used to compute the power of their study. Such a risk reduction exceeds that reported in the largest trials to date, and results from these studies also had wide confidence intervals.^2-4 Such studies generally have found that external hip protectors reduce the risk of fracture, but that poor adherence undermines their effectiveness. It is not clear that the measure of compliance in this study was comparable with that of other studies, and both recall bias and provision of socially acceptable responses may have overestimated true compliance in those who fell.

Effectiveness is a . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Lisa A. Honkanen, MD
Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology
Weill Medical College of Cornell University
New York, NY

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?