Doctors may be able to determine who is at risk for dementia based on their trips to the emergency room.
A new study from Yale found that dementia patients were 40 percent more likely to visit the emergency room during the year before they were diagnosed, compared to those who did not have the condition.
In the month before they were diagnosed, the admission rate for dementia patients was approximately seven times higher than the average rate for non-dementia patients.
This trend is likely due to falls and other injuries caused by deficits in cognition and coordination.
The graph above shows a spike in hospital admissions among dementia patients in the month before their diagnosis
The team, led by Dr Cameron Gettel, said in the paper: ‘The Emergency Department (ED) setting provides a valuable opportunity to screen for cognitive impairment, which may otherwise go undetected until it has progressed substantially.
‘Additionally, emergency department visits may trigger a diagnostic cascade toward dementia, reflecting the complex nature of dementia identification.’
In the study, published in JAMA Open Networkresearchers analyzed data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, which interviews up to 30,000 Medicare recipients annually about their health.
It retrieved the medical records of 1,779 dementia patients and linked them to more than 3,500 similar patients who did not have the condition.
The patients were on average 82 years old, 60 percent were women and more than half had two or more underlying health conditions, such as obesity or arthritis.
The patients are from surveys conducted between 2015 and 2021.
Those with dementia had a slightly lower rate of emergency room admissions six months before their diagnosis, at 1.69 per 100 patients, compared to those who did not have the disease, about 2.08 per 100.
But in the month immediately preceding the diagnosis of dementia, the group of dementia patients saw their admission rate increase to 13 per 100.
The reason for admission to hospital was not recorded each time.
Early warning signs of dementia – such as forgetting recent events and making occasional mistakes with bills – are often dismissed by families as old age.
As a result, years can pass before a formal diagnosis is made and patients receive the right support and treatment.
Research shows that 58 percent of adults in the US with probable dementia were undiagnosed or unaware that they might have the condition.
And some people find that a significant portion of patients are not diagnosed until later stages.
Doctors say patients should get themselves screened for dementia if they have memory or cognitive changes that concern them.