Infections Account for Many Older Patients' ER Visits

Infectious diseases lead to older adults’ trips to the emergency room (ER) at a rate that’s more than heart attack and congestive heart failure combined, according to a new study.

In an effort to investigate the frequency of infectious disease-related emergency department visits of elderly adults in the United States, a team including researchers from Harvard Medical School examined claims data from roughly 134 million ER visits between the years 2011 and 2012.
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The investigators focused on individuals in the ER aged 65 and older with a primary diagnosis of an infectious disease, and determined that infectious diseases accounted for 13.5% of ER visits among those patients. According to the authors, 57% of these approximately 3 million visits—a weighted estimate of 3,123,909 emergency department visits for infectious diseases was calculated in elderly United States adults—resulted in hospitalizations. Among participants age 85 and older, the rate of hospitalizations increased to 66.5%, the researchers note.  

Overall, lower respiratory tract infections represented 26% of all ER visits for infectious diseases, and accounted for 15% of infectious disease-related deaths during ER visits and hospitalizations. Pneumonia alone accounted for 17.5% of ER visits, while septicemia represented 32% of infectious disease-related hospitalizations and 75% of infectious disease-related deaths during ER visits and hospitalizations.

The study, which the authors say is the first of its kind, found that “the public health burden of infectious diseases in elderly U.S. adults was substantial,” as was measured in this research by emergency department visits, subsequent hospitalizations, and hospital-based mortality.

—Mark McGraw

Reference

Goto T, Yoshida K, et al. Infectious Disease-Related Emergency Department Visits of Elderly Adults in the United States, 2011-2012. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2016.