ArticleJournal of evaluation in clinical practice2025
Older hospitalised patients with a chief complaint of weakness and nonspecific presentations are not at risk of adverse health outcomes.
Article in Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Older hospitalised patients with a chief complaint of weakness and nonspecific presentations are not at risk of adverse health outcomes.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
RATIONALE AND
objectiveOlder adults in the Emergency Department (ED) often present with nonspecific complaints (NSC) that might be associated with adverse health outcomes due to underestimating the seriousness of the illness by health care workers.
methodsWe selected a random sample of patients aged 65 or older who complained of weakness and were hospitalised in internal medicine departments in 2019-2021. We divided the patients into those with and without specific reasons for hospitalisation after the ED evaluation. Outcome variables included changes in medical care based on CT head scans and blood tests, and whether a delay in diagnosis led to a longer stay, in-hospital mortality, or readmission within 30 days.
resultsPatients were aged 82 ± 8 years and 43.6% (233/536)were female. 46.8% (260/556) of the patients had a specific reason for hospitalisation after the ED evaluation including four patients presenting with confusion, without neurological findings but with acute ischaemia found on the brain CT. Patients without a specific presentation had fewer blood tests done due to a significantly shorter hospital stay (median (1st-3rd quartiles: 3 (2-4) vs. 4 (3-6) days, p < 0.001), a lower mortality rate, 0.3% (n = 1) compared to 4.2% (n = 11), p = 0.002), and fewer readmissions 13.5%(n = 40) compared to 20.4% (n = 53). The deaths and readmissions in both groups were not due to a delay in diagnosis.
conclusionsElderly patients with a chief complaint of weakness with and without a specific reason for hospitalisation were not at an increased risk for inappropriate treatment or a missed diagnosis.
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