Emergency Admissions of Aged People in General Hospital

Hospital Use by the Extremely Elderly (Nonagenarians): A Two‐year Study

“…Similarly, neither the types of chronic diseases diagnosed nor the numbers of drugs prescribed predicted hospital admission or death. Nonetheless, several broad categories of diagnosis were most frequently responsible for hospital admission: dehydration (12), pneumonia (8), fracture other than that of hip (7), heart failure (5), urinary tract infection (5), fracture of the hip (4), acute myocardial infarction (4), and decubitus ulceration (4). The following factors did appear to correlate with an increased risk of hospital admission: 1) tendency to self‐neglect (while there were only three subjects in this group, all were admitted); 2) recent discharge from hospital (of 39 patients admitted in the first year, 51 per cent were readmitted during the study period); and 3) the use of a visiting nurse service ( P < 0.05).…”

“…We were able to find only a few studies about the causes of death of the very old and a few reports on the causes of admissions to acute care hospitals, mostly from European countries 3–7 . Therefore we investigated the acute care hospital admission rate and outcome of a cohort of 87 persons at least 90 years of age under continuous care by a university‐based home medical service.…”