Doctors may be able to determine who is at risk for dementia based on ER visits.
A new study from Yale University found that people with dementia are 40% more likely to visit the ER in the year before being diagnosed than people without dementia.
In the month before diagnosis, the average hospitalization rate for people with dementia was about seven times higher than the average hospitalization rate for people without dementia.
This trend may be due to falls and other injuries caused by lack of cognition or coordination.
The graph above shows a sharp increase in hospitalizations for people with dementia in the month before diagnosis.
“The emergency department (ED) setting provides a valuable opportunity to screen for cognitive impairment, which may otherwise go unnoticed until well advanced,” the team led by Dr. Cameron Guettel wrote in their paper. There is a gender,” he said.
“Furthermore, emergency department visits can trigger a diagnostic cascade to dementia, reflecting the particular complex nature of dementia.”
In a study published in JAMA Open Networkresearchers analyzed data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, which interviews up to 30,000 Medicare users each year about their health status.
The medical records of 1,779 dementia patients were extracted and matched with more than 3,500 similar patients without dementia.
The average age of the patients was 82 years, 60% were women, and more than half had two or more underlying health conditions, such as obesity or arthritis.
Patients were drawn from surveys conducted between 2015 and 2021.
Patients with dementia had a slightly lower rate of ER admissions six months before diagnosis, at 1.69 per 100 compared to about 2.08 per 100.
However, in the month immediately before dementia diagnosis, the hospitalization rate for the dementia patient group jumped to 13 out of 100.
The reason for admission in each case was not recorded.
Early warning signs of dementia, such as forgetting recent events or occasionally making mistakes on bills, are often dismissed by family members as a result of getting older.
As a result, it can take years before a formal diagnosis is made and patients receive appropriate support and treatment.
Research shows that 58 percent of adults in the U.S. who may have dementia were either undiagnosed or unaware they might have dementia.
Others believe that a significant proportion of patients may not be diagnosed until later stages.
Doctors say patients should be tested for dementia if they have worrisome changes in memory or cognition.
