1. The impact of frailty and delirium on mortality in older inpatients.
- Author
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Eeles, Eamonn M. P., White, Susan V., O'Mahony, Sinead M., Bayer, Antony J., and Hubbard, Ruth E.
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DELIRIUM , *FRAIL elderly , *HOSPITAL patients , *LONGITUDINAL method , *TIME , *PROPORTIONAL hazards models , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics , *KAPLAN-Meier estimator , *OLD age ,MORTALITY risk factors - Abstract
Background: delirium and frailty are common among hospitalised older people but delirium is often missed and frailty considered difficult to measure in clinical practice.Objective: to explore the relationship between delirium and frailty in older inpatients and determine their impact on survival.Design and setting: the prospective cohort study of 273 patients aged ≥75 years.Measures: patients were screened for delirium at presentation and on alternate days throughout their hospital stay. Frailty status was measured by an index of accumulated deficits (FI), giving a potential score from 0 (no deficits) to 1.0 (all 33 deficits), with 0.25 used as the cut-off between ‘fit’ and ‘frail’.Results: delirium was detected in 102 patients (mean FI: 0.33) and excluded in 171 (mean FI: 0.18) (P < 0.005); 111 patients were frail. Among patients with delirium, the median survival in fit patients was 359 days (95% CI: 118–600) compared with 88 days for those who were frail (95% CI: 5–171; P < 0.05).Conclusion: delirium was associated with higher levels of frailty: the identification of frail patients may help to target those at a greatest risk of delirium. Survival following delirium was poor with the combination of frailty and delirium conferring a particularly bleak prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
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