Gerontology
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Health status and the needs presented by people admitted to nursing homes make it necessary to contemplate aspects such as prognosis to offer quality palliative care. ⋯ Prognostic models such as ours that include variables commonly included in clinical assessments can help nursing home professionals prioritize and ensure adequate mobilization of palliative care resources, which are very limited in these institutions.
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Paratonia is a distinctive form of hypertonia, causing loss of functional mobility in early stages of dementia to severe high muscle tone and pain in the late stages. For assessing and evaluating therapeutic interventions, objective instruments are required. ⋯ The MyotonPRO is potentially applicable for cross-sectional studies between groups of paratonia patients and appears less suitable to measure intraindividual changes in paratonia. Because of the inherent variability in movement resistance in paratonia, the outcomes from the MyotonPRO should be interpreted with care; therefore, future research should focus on additional guidelines to increase the clinical interpretation and improving reproducibility.
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The ability to engage in sexual activity and better cognitive functioning are both associated with better health. However, the association between cognitive functioning and sexual activity is understudied. ⋯ Having no cognitive impairment was associated with more engagement in sexual activity and physical tenderness among community-dwelling older adults. Sexuality is an important aspect of active aging and our findings illustrate a potential barrier to maintaining or instigating intimate relationships as we age. Longitudinal analyses are required to explore the direction of effect.
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Observational Study
The Role of Frailty in Acute Coronary Syndromes in the Elderly.
Myocardial infarction (MI) patients are increasingly older, and common risk scores include chronological age, but do not consider chronic comorbidity or biological age. Frailty status reflects these variables and may be independently correlated with prognosis in this setting. ⋯ Frailty is an independent prognostic marker of the composite of mortality and reinfarction and of overall mortality in patients aged ≥75 years admitted due to MI.
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Despite National Surgical Quality Improvement guidelines to integrate frailty into surgical elder assessments, a quick, accurate, and simple frailty assessment tool suitable for busy clinical settings is still not available. Recently, we have demonstrated that a simple upper-extremity function (UEF) test based on wearable sensors could identify frailty with high agreement with conventional assessments by testing 20-s repetitive elbow flexion and extension. ⋯ The results of this study suggest that a 20-s UEF test is practical in the trauma setting and could be used as a quick measure for predicting adverse events and outcomes among bedbound patients after discharge. Assessing frailty using UEF may assist in objective triage, treatment, and post-discharge decision-making with regard to geriatric trauma patients.