A new study has found that older adults who live in nursing homes or assisted-living facilities are at risk for fatal injuries, often at the hands of other residents. 

It’s called resident-to-resident aggression, and many families are unaware that it’s a risk.

Sheryl Chatfield, an assistant professor at Kent State University in Ohio, and her two colleagues were looking at intimate partner violence using data from the National Violent Death Reporting System from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What they found was a pattern of resident to resident aggression. So they started tagging them.

"And we found a surprising number of incidents of resident to resident aggression," Chatfield said. "Like a lot of people, it’s not something you consider when you think about yourself or your aging relatives and people being in some type of long term care that there’s this kind of risk."

Chatfield said they only looked at incidents that resulted in death, which means there could be many unreported incidents. She also says about half of the incidents involved someone with dementia.