Predictors of health decline in older adults with pneumonia: findings from the Community Acquired Pneumonia Impact Study

BMC Geriatrics

Research Article

Eduardo Fernandez¹  Paul Krueger²  Mark Loeb³ 

[1] Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada;Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada;Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada;Departments of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada;Michael DeGroote Institute for Infectious Diseases, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada;

关键词: Community Acquire Pneumonia;    Family Caregiver;    Subjective Social Status;    Radiology Clinic;    Potential Predictor Variable;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2318-10-1

 received in 2009-09-30, accepted in 2010-01-04,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe purpose of this study was to identify predictors of health decline among older adults with clinically diagnosed community acquired pneumonia (CAP). It was hypothesized that older adults with CAP who had lower levels of social support would be more likely to report a decline in health.MethodsA telephone survey was used to collect detailed information from older adults about their experiences with CAP. A broader determinants of health framework was used to guide data collection. This was a community wide study with participants being recruited from all radiology clinics in one Ontario community.ResultsThe most important predictors of a health decline included: two symptoms (no energy; diaphoresis), two lifestyle variables (being very active; allowing people to smoke in their home), one quality of life variable (little difficulty in doing usual daily activities) and one social support variable (having siblings).ConclusionsA multiplicity of factors was found to be associated with a decline in health among older adults with clinically diagnosed CAP. These findings may be useful to physicians, family caregivers and others for screening older adults and providing interventions to help ensure positive health outcomes.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Fernandez et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.