Gerontology
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Diagnosis of acute abdominal pain in older persons is a challenge, with the age-related increase in concurrent diseases. In most western countries the number of elderly people is constantly rising, which means that an increasing proportion of patients admitted for abdominal pain at the emergency department are elderly. ⋯ Both the preliminary diagnosis at the emergency department and the discharge diagnosis were less reliable in elderly than in younger patients. Elderly patients more often had specific organic disease and arrived at the emergency department after a longer history of abdominal pain compared to younger patients.
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Admission of older patients to intensive care units is a controversial issue. ⋯ In our study, age was not related with a significant higher mortality. In the older patients included in our study the survival was greater than 70% with a similar resource utilization except for a longer stay in the intensive care unit.
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Explanations for associations found between sensory and cognitive function remain unclear. ⋯ We have documented an age-related correlation between sensory and cognitive function in a normal ageing sample. The association between sensory impairment and likely cognitive impairment remained significant after excluding vision-related MMSE items and adjusting for confounding factors. Our data suggest that age-related decline and the effect of visual impairment on the measurement of cognition only partly explain the association between sensory and cognitive impairments in older persons.