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THURSDAY, March 8, 2018 (HealthDay News) — A revisit to the emergency department within 30 days of a previous visit predicts poor outcomes in elderly adults, according to a study published online Feb. 28 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Jelle de Gelder, M.D., from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and colleagues assessed predictors of emergency department revisits and the association between revisits and 90-day functional decline or mortality among 1,093 older adults (median age 79 years) discharged from the emergency departments of one academic and two regional Dutch hospitals.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that 114 participants (10.4 percent) had an emergency department revisit within 30 days of discharge. Independent predictors of a 30-day revisit included age (hazard ratio [HR], 0.96), male sex (HR, 1.61), polypharmacy (HR, 2.06), and cognitive impairment (HR, 1.71). To predict a revisit, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.65. Individuals with a revisit were at higher risk (odds ratio, 1.99) of functional decline or mortality in propensity-score-matched analysis.<\/p>\n
“An early emergency department revisit is a strong new predictor of adverse outcomes in older adults,” the authors write.<\/p>\n