- Review article
- Open access
- Published:
Delirium: a common preventable medical disorder in elderly patients
The Egyptian Journal of Internal Medicine volume 31, pages 403–407 (2019)
Abstract
Delirium is one of commonest unmet medical emergencies in clinical practice however, its role in increasing mortality, hospital admission and institutional placement in very obvious. In addition, a link was found between delirium and development of dementia based on the finding that significant number of delirious patients developed persistent cognitive impairment thereafter. Several factors can lead to delirium or aggravate it and consequently primary care physician should be aware by these factors keeping in mind that delirium is still a treatable condition if identified and managed appropriately and urgently.
References
Skaruon K, Rudi G, Jane S. Delirium in elderly people. Lancet 2014; 383:911–922.
Cole MG. Delirium in elderly. Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 2004; 12:7–21.
Han JH, Zimmerman EE, Cutler N. Delirium in older emergency department patients: recognition, risk factors& subtypes. Acad Emerg Med 2009; 16:193–200.
Mohony R, Murthyl L, Kunne A. Synopsis of the national institute of health and clinical excellence guidelines for prevention of delirium. Ann Intern Med 2011; 154:746–751.
Noggle CA, Dean RS. Delirium. New York, NY: The Neuro-psychology& Psychopathology Book; Springer; 2013. pp. 425–444.
Hages CG, Patel MB, Pandhari PP. Pathophysiology of acute brain dysfunction. What is the cause of all this confusion? Curr Opin Crit Care 2012; 18:518–526.
Lauretani F, Geda GP, Maggio M. Capturing side effects of medications to identify persons at risk of delirium. Aging Clin Exp Res 2010; 22:456–488.
Inouye SK, Charpentier PA. Precipitating factors for delirium in hospitalized elderly persons. JAMA 1996; 275:852–857.
Jacobson S, Jerrier H. EEG in delirium. Semin Clin Neuropsychiatry 2000; 5:86–92.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
Rights and permissions
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Hemeda, A. Delirium: a common preventable medical disorder in elderly patients. Egypt J Intern Med 31, 403–407 (2019). https://doi.org/10.4103/ejim.ejim_55_19
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4103/ejim.ejim_55_19