Doctors can determine who is at risk for dementia based on their emergency room visits.
A new Yale study found that patients with dementia were 40 percent more likely to visit the emergency room in the year before being diagnosed compared to those without the condition.
In the month before diagnosis, the admission rate of patients with dementia was approximately seven times higher than the average rate of patients without dementia.
The trend is likely due to falls and other injuries caused by failures in cognition and coordination.
The graph above shows an increase in hospital admissions among patients with dementia in the month before their diagnosis.
The team, led by Dr. Cameron Gettel, stated in the article: “The Emergency Department (ED) environment provides a valuable opportunity to detect cognitive impairment, which may otherwise go undetected until it has substantially progressed.”
“In addition, ED visits can trigger a diagnostic cascade to dementia, reflecting the complex nature of dementia identification.”
In the study, published in JAMA Open NetworkThe researchers analyzed data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, which interviews up to 30,000 Medicare users each year about their health.
He extracted the medical records of 1,779 patients with dementia and compared them with more than 3,500 similar patients who did not have the condition.
The patients were an average of 82 years old, 60 percent were women, and more than half had two or more underlying health problems, such as obesity or arthritis.
The patients were drawn from surveys conducted between 2015 and 2021.
Those with dementia had a slightly lower emergency admission rate six months before their diagnosis, 1.69 out of every 100 patients, compared to those without the disease, about 2.08 out of every 100.
But in the month immediately before the dementia diagnosis, the group of dementia patients saw their admission rate increase to 13 out of 100.
The reason for admission to the hospital was not recorded in each case.
Families often dismiss the early warning signs of dementia, such as forgetting recent events and making occasional mistakes with bills, as a consequence of old age.
As a result, it can take years before a formal diagnosis is made and patients receive appropriate support and treatment.
Studies suggest that 58 percent of adults in the US with probable dementia were undiagnosed or did not know they might have the condition.
And some suggest that a significant portion of patients are not diagnosed until the later stages.
Doctors say patients should be screened for dementia if they have any cognitive or memory changes that concern them.