24-hours mortality in seniors hospitalised with medical conditions

Mortality is the hardest outcome characterising the severity of diseases and the result of the health care. It is connected mainly with elderly patients (pts.). Information on 24-hours hospital mortality (M24) in seniors admitted to nonsurgical departments is scarce.

In a retrospective observational study, we investigated M24 in pts. of 65 years of age and older, who were discharged from an university geriatric department in years 2016-2018. The identification of diseases which primarily led to M24 and their classification was independently performed by authors from geriatric and internal medicine departments.

We proved that M24 is rather frequent (2.3 % out of all hospitalised pts.). There was a 2.4-fold M24 incidence increase from the age 65-69 years up to 90 years (from 1.4 to 3.3 %). The average age of deceased M24 pts. (n = 101) was 80.8 years and was not different from the age of those who deceased later. The majority of M24 (58.4 %) occurred during the first 12 hours after the admission to the hospital. There were many diseases (n = 25) that primarily led to M24 with dominating cardiovascular pathologies (39.6 %), followed closely by infective diseases (33.7 %). Therapeutically irreversible advanced chronic diseases led to M24 in 15.8 %. There was a higher frequency of acute diseases therapeutically irreversibly decompensating pre-existing diseases (43.6 %) than that of acute diseases incompatible with survival (33.7 %).