Hospitalized Patients at Risk for Cognitive Decline

Cross Your Fingers, Cover Your Butt
Yes Be Scared of Hospitals

Dirk Anschutz
We have reported on this issue before and the conclusion is the same – avoid the hospital at all costs.
In a study of 1,870 Chicagoans over the age of 65, researchers tested the participants’ cognitive functioning and long-term memory following a hospitalization. They found that overall cognitive function declined more than twice as fast after a first hospital stay. What’s more, on specific cognitive tests, the rate of decline after the first hospital stay was more than three times faster on a long-term memory test and 1.5 times faster on a complex attention test.


The National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging supported the study. It was published in the March 21 issue of Neurology.
Two years ago we reported that researchers, found that hospitalized elderly have an increased risk of cognitive decline. 2,929 people, aged 65 and older, were studied over 13 years. All did not have dementia at the start of the study. During follow-up, 1,287 were hospitalized for a non-critical illness and 41 were hospitalized for a critical illness, while 1,601 of the participants were not hospitalized.
Among those hospitalized for one or more non-critical illnesses, there were 228 cases of dementia, and among those hospitalized with one or more critical illnesses, there were five cases of dementia. There were 146 cases of dementia reported among the participants who weren’t hospitalized.
Researchers concluded that patients hospitalized for a non-critical illness were 40 percent more likely to develop dementia than those who weren’t hospitalized.
Is it the hospitalization or the illness to begin with that causes this increase? The jury is out. With the increased risk of infections in a hospital, it must play a contributing factor.
Of course hospitals and nursing homes have a huge challenge in front of them to prevent hospitalizations.

So help them. Any way you look at it, this still gets back to basics. Most of what lands us in the hospital, not all but most, is directly related to our life choices.