BACKGROUND Advancing age is associated with increased vulnerability to chronic health problems. Identifying factors that predict oldest-old status is vital for developing effective clinical interventions and public health strategies. METHODS Observational prospective study of patients aged 75 years and older consecutively admitted to an Acute Geriatric Ward of a tertiary hospital. After a com...

OBJECTIVE To see whether elderly medical in-patients screening positive for depression on the Geriatric Depression Score show any change on discharge home and whether their scores predict this. DESIGN A prospective study. SETTING A large outer London district general hospital with acute wards for all medical admissions of people aged over 75 years. PARTICIPANTS We studied 179 consecutive ...

OBJECTIVES Data on acute geriatric patients' nutritional status are lacking, and the associations among physical function, sarcopenia, health status and nutritional status are not sufficiently investigated in this population. The aims of this study are to investigate (1) nutritional status and sarcopenia in a group of acute geriatric patients, (2) the association between nutritional status, phy...

BACKGROUND Geriatric patients are at high risk of re-admission after discharge. Pre-existing nutritional risk amongst these patients is of primary concern, with former nutritional intervention studies being largely ineffective. None of these studies has included individual dietary counselling by a registered dietician or has considered competing medical conditions in the participants. A former ...

Materials and methods We performed a retrospective study from 1998 until 2007 for two groups of patients. The first group is composed by 110 patients underwent to laparoscopic cholecystectomy (group A) and the second group composed by 60 patients underwent to traditional laparotomy (group B). Both groups were compared for the duration of surgical procedures, for intra-operative and post-operati...

In a review of 292 hospital patients who had cardiac arrests over a period of two and a half years patients aged 60 and over were contrasted with those under 60, based on a 50-item clinical questionary completed at the time of the episode. Survival rates were identical (23%) in these two groups. On contrasting patients who survived with those who did not it was again found that age did not infl...

Rectal swabs obtained from 10 of 49 chronic-care geriatric patients were positive for Clostridium difficile, for a prevalence rate of 20.4%. Simultaneous sampling of 29 patients in an acute geriatric ward revealed four colonized patients, for a prevalence rate of 13.7%. A prospective study of C. difficile colonization in 100 consecutive patients admitted to an acute geriatric ward was carried o...

BACKGROUND career intentions of medical students may impact on education and workforce planning. We sought to determine (i) career choices of senior medical students; (ii) interest in geriatric medicine; (iii) factors influencing such choices; and (iv) the impact of a 6-week Medicine in the Community module. METHODS cross-sectional survey of all senior UCD medical students, before and after c...

BACKGROUND Management of geriatric patients would be simplified if a universally accepted definition of frailty for clinical use was defined. Among definitions of frailty, Fried frailty phenotype criteria constitute a common reference frame for many geriatric studies. However, this reference frame has been tested primarily in elderly patients presenting with relatively good health status. OBJ...

background and aims. an absolute knowledge of a patient’s medical problems, especially in geriatrics, is crucial for providing safe and appropriate dental treatment in the context of any systemic dis orders, intake of medications, or other oral pathologies. the purpose of this article was to determine the prevalence of self-reported medical conditions and drugs used in periodontally compromised...