Washington ? Trip and fall lately? Seniors often won’t mention it unless they’re hurt, but new guidelines say that first tumble is a good predictor of who’s at risk for another, more serious fall.

With deaths from falls increasing, the guidelines urge doctors to ask patients to ‘fess up.

Better would be to prevent even that first fall. Now scientists are testing simple wrist monitors that may one day be used to predict who is most likely to topple, by tracking how stable they are with each step on any given day.

It’s a question of growing urgency, as fatal falls have spiked in the last decade. The government recorded more than 19,000 deaths from fall-caused injuries in 2005, the latest data available. Three-fourths were among people 65 and older.

Nonfatal falls trigger another half-million hospitalizations and almost 2 million emergency room visits.

Anybody can fall, especially during ice-slick winters or while playing sports. But aging brings physical changes that make a fall more likely. Still, falls are something of the Rodney Dangerfield of injury prevention, so commonplace – one in three seniors falls each year – that they receive little attention until someone is seriously harmed, such as breaking a hip or suffering a brain injury.

Hence the emphasis on revealing earlier falls in guidelines published by the American Academy of Neurology last week. Someone who’s fallen in the past year without a logical reason, such as a sports injury, has about a 55 percent chance of falling again.