Doctors may be able to work out who is at risk of dementia based on their trips to the ER.
A new study from Yale found that dementia patients were 40 percent more likely to visit the ER over 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 about seven times higher than the average rate for non-dementia patients.
The trend is likely due to falls and other injuries caused by lapses in cognition and coordination.
The above graph shows a spike in hospital admissions among dementia patients in the month before their diagnosis is made
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 might otherwise go unnoticed until it has progressed substantially.
‘Additionally, ED visits may trigger a diagnostic cascade toward dementia, reflecting the complex nature of dementia’s identification.’
In the study, published in JAMA Open Network, researchers analyzed data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, which interviews up to 30,000 Medicare users every year on their health.
It extracted the medical records of 1,779 dementia patients and matched them to more than 3,500 similar patients who did not have the condition.
Patients were 82 years old on average, 60 percent were female and more than half had two or more underlying health conditions — such as obesity or arthritis.
The patients were extracted from surveys carried out between 2015 and 2021.
Those with dementia had a slightly lower ER admission rate six months before their diagnosis, at 1.69 out of 100 patients, compared to those who did not have the disease, about 2.08 out of 100.
But in the month immediately before a dementia diagnosis, the dementia patient group saw their admission rate jump to 13 out of 100.
The reason for admission to the hospital in each case was not recorded.
Early warning signs of dementia — such as forgetting recent events and making occasional errors with bills — are often dismissed by families as down to old age.
As a result, years may pass before a formal diagnosis is made — and patients receive proper support and treatment.
Studies suggest that 58 percent of adults in the US with probable dementia were either undiagnosed or unaware they may have the condition.
And some stuggest a significant portion of patients are not diagnosed until the later stages.
Doctors say patients should get themselves screened for dementia if they have any memory or cognitive changes that concern them.
