Elderly patients may decrease their work and physical activities as they get older.
Do they require more frequent hospital admission following trauma? Is this due to
underlying co-morbid conditions, risk factors such as osteoporosis or dementia, or
do they have more frequent injury? What is the economic impact of this hospital care
and, in an era of shrinking resources, what steps may reduce the cost? In an article
recently published in the Journal of Surgical Research, Chang and his co-workers reported on the California experience in 2008. Their review
of 2.2 million hospital admissions revealed that there was a cumulative lifetime incidence
of hospital admission for trauma of 11.2%. The elderly patient had a disproportionate
incidence of admission for traumatic injury and that the incidence of admission for
trauma increased with age. In this cross-sectional population-based analysis, the
cumulative lifetime charge was approximately $6500 for trauma compared with an overall
anticipated lifetime charge of $81,000 for all reasons for admission. This resulted
in a total yearly spending of $7.62 billion for the elderly on trauma admissions [
1
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: November 21, 2011
Accepted:
October 26,
2011
Received:
October 25,
2011
Identification
Copyright
© 2012 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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- Projected Lifetime Risks and Hospital Care Expenditure for Traumatic InjuryJournal of Surgical ResearchVol. 176Issue 2
- PreviewThe lifetime risk and expected cost of trauma care would be valuable for health policy planners, but this information is currently unavailable. The cumulative incidence rates methodology, based on a cross-sectional population analysis, offers an alternative approach to prohibitively costly prospective cohort studies.
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