Comment by zkmon
People fall because the surroundings are unfamiliar, their trust and assumptions about things around them, and about themselves, have gone wrong. Why does this discrepancy arise? For older people, the world around them and food they eat has changed too fast, to the extent of being an alien land. They walk on a surface, making assumptions based on what they were familiar with in the past. But the surface is no longer the same. They eat the changed food, assuming that it will keep them as strong as before. That turns out to be false as well. Most old people feel that they are living in a world that is completely unfamiliar and untrustworthy.
I think this can be seen here up north, where people fall through ice and drown every fall and (more commonly) spring. It's not a new thing – these people are almost always male, at least in their 50s, alone on the ice, and taking stupid unnecessary risks trying to reach their favorite ice fishing spot or whatever – but I can't help but think that increasingly these deaths are caused by assumptions that the ice is strong enough because it has "always been at this time of the year". Except that it isn't, not anymore. Or even if it is this year, the annual variance is much greater.