HMM: This Is Why Your Balance Gets Worse After 40. “The researchers found that the vestibular threshold in the people studied was increasingly higher after the age of 40. These thresholds increased up to 83 percent per decade after that age, the researchers said.”

Maybe so, but I think it also has to do with practice. When you’re a kid, you do a lot of things that keep your balance system trained up. As an adult, not so much — and as you get older and more worried about falling, you give it steadily less training. My own experience is that if you work on balance, you get better fast, and you can practically feel those neural networks warming up after just a few times.