The impact of frailty and delirium on mortality in older inpatients

Eeles, Eamonn, White, Susan V., O'Mahony, Sinead M., Bayer, Antony James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7514-248X and Hubbard, Ruth Eleanor 2012. The impact of frailty and delirium on mortality in older inpatients. Age and Ageing 41 (3) , pp. 412-416. 10.1093/ageing/afs021

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	delirium, frail older adults, survival, elderly
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0002-0729
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 10:59
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/42043

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