Comprehensive geriatric assessment predicts mortality and adverse outcomes in hospitalized older adults

Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) provides detailed information on clinical, functional and cognitive aspects of older patients and is especially useful for assessing frail individuals. Although a large proportion of hospitalized older adults demonstrate a high level of complexity, CGA was not developed specifically for this setting. Our aim was to evaluate the application of a CGA model for the clinical characterization and prognostic prediction of hospitalized older adults.

This was a prospective observational study including 746 patients aged 60 years and over who were admitted to a geriatric ward of a university hospital between January 2009 and December 2011, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The proposed CGA was applied to evaluate all patients at admission. The primary outcome was in-hospital death, and the secondary outcomes were delirium, nosocomial infections, functional decline and length of stay. Multivariate binary logistic regression was performed to assess independent factors associated with these outcomes, including socio-demographic, clinical, functional, cognitive, and laboratory variables. Impairment in ten CGA components was particularly investigated: polypharmacy, activities of daily living (ADL) dependency, instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) dependency, depression, dementia, delirium, urinary incontinence, falls, malnutrition, and poor social support.

The studied patients were mostly women (67.4%), and the mean age was 80.5±7.9 years. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed the following independent factors associated with in-hospital death: IADL dependency (OR=4.02; CI=1.52-10.58; p=.005); ADL dependency (OR=2.39; CI=1.25-4.56; p=.008); malnutrition (OR=2.80; CI=1.63-4.83; p<.001); poor social support (OR=5.42; CI=2.93-11.36; p<.001); acute kidney injury (OR=3.05; CI=1.78-5.27; p<.001); and the presence of pressure ulcers (OR=2.29; CI=1.04-5.07; p=.041). ADL dependency was independently associated with both delirium incidence and nosocomial infections (respectively: OR=3.78; CI=2.30-6.20; p<.001 and OR=2.30; CI=1.49-3.49; p<.001). The number of impaired CGA components was also found to be associated with in-hospital death (p<.001), delirium incidence (p<.001) and nosocomial infections (p=.005). Additionally, IADL dependency, malnutrition and history of falls predicted longer hospitalizations. There were no significant changes in overall functional status during the hospital stay.

CGA identified patients at higher risk of in-hospital death and adverse outcomes, of which those with functional dependence, malnutrition and poor social support were foremost.