"One-month hospitalization rate before dementia diagnosis is seven times higher than that of the general population"
Oct 15, 2024
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In addition, dementia patients were 40% more likely to visit the emergency room during the year prior to diagnosis.
The Yale University research team compared and analyzed 1779 dementia patients with more than 3,500 patients without dementia.
The median age of the patients was 82 years, 60% were female, and more than half had two or more underlying conditions, such as obesity or arthritis.
As a result of the analysis, patients with dementia had an emergency room admission rate of 1.69 per 100 people 6 months before diagnosis, slightly lower than 2.08 among 100 non-inpatients.
However, the hospitalization rate of the dementia patients group surged to 13 out of 100 in the month immediately before they were diagnosed with dementia.
The research team explained that this was due to falls and other injuries caused by cognitive decline and loss of motor power.
The results of this study were recently published in the American Medical Association journal JAMA Network Open.
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