Background Hospitalisation is often harmful for people with dementia and results in high societal costs, so avoidance of unnecessary admissions is a global priority. However, no intervention has yet reduced admissions of community-dwelling people with dementia. We therefore aimed to examine hospitalisation rates of people with dementia and whether these differ from people without dementia and to identify socio-demographic and clinical predictors of hospitalisation. Methods We searched MEDLINE, Embase, and PsycINFO from inception to 9 May 2019. We included observational studies which (1) examined community-dwelling people with dementia of any age or dementia subtype, (2) diagnosed dementia using validated diagnostic criteria, and (3) examined all-cause general (i.e. non-psychiatric) hospital admissions. Two authors screened abstracts for inclusion and independently extracted data and assessed included studies for risk of bias. Three authors graded evidence strength using Cochrane’s GRADE approach, including assessing for evidence of publication bias using Begg’s test. We used random effects meta-analysis to pool estimates for hospitalisation risk in people with and without dementia. Results We included 34 studies of 277,432 people with dementia: 17 from the USA, 15 from Europe, and 2 from Asia. The pooled relative risk of hospitalisation for people with dementia compared to those without was 1.42 (95% confidence interval 1.21, 1.66) in studies adjusted for age, sex, and physical comorbidity. Hospitalisation rates in people with dementia were between 0.37 and 1.26/person-year in high-quality studies. There was strong evidence that admission is associated with older age, and moderately strong evidence that multimorbidity, polypharmacy, and lower functional ability are associated with admission. There was strong evidence that dementia severity alone is not associated. Conclusions People with dementia are more frequently admitted to hospital than those without dementia, independent of physical comorbidities. Future interventions to reduce unnecessary hospitalisations should target potentially modifiable factors, such as polypharmacy and functional ability, in high-risk populations. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12916-019-1369-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
The use of primary care databases has been integral in pharmacoepidemiological studies and pharmacovigilance. Primary care databases derive from electronic health records and offer a comprehensive description of aggregate patient data, from demography to medication history, and good sample sizes. Studies using these databases improve our understanding of prescribing characteristics and associated risk factors to facilitate better patient care, but there are limitations. We describe eight key scenarios where study data outcomes can be affected by absent prescriptions in UK primary care databases: (1) out-of-hours, urgent care and acute care prescriptions; (2) specialist-only prescriptions; (3) alternative community prescribing, such as pharmacy, family planning clinic or sexual health clinic medication prescriptions; (4) newly licensed medication prescriptions; (5) medications that do not require prescriptions; (6) hospital inpatient and outpatient prescriptions; (7) handwritten prescriptions; and (8) private pharmacy and private doctor prescriptions. The significance of each scenario is dependent on the type of medication under investigation, nature of the study and expected outcome measures. We recommend that all researchers using primary care databases be aware of the potential for missing prescribing data and be sensitive to how this can vary substantially between items, drug classes, patient groups and over time. Close liaison with practising primary care clinicians in the UK is often essential to ensure awareness of nuances in clinical practice.
This study measured the exposure to different categories of medicinal products discussed by the European Union (EU) Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee from September to November 2018 in four electronic primary care health databases: IQVIA Medical Research Data‐UK, IQVIA Medical Research Data‐France, IQVIA Medical Research Data‐Germany, and Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum, in the entire lifespan of each database until August 31, 2018. The assessment of 83 centrally authorized products and 45 nationally authorized products showed that coverage was better for products marketed for longer duration and worse for orphan drugs. The ability to detect associations against hypothetical comparators was better for more common events and for larger effect sizes. Coverage of advanced therapies was worse for those typically administered in a specialized rather than primary care setting. This study shows that to enable better informed regulatory decisions there is a need to access complementary data sources, particularly capturing secondary care prescribing.
Background: Human rights legislation safeguards the privacy and dignity of patients. Objective: To assess the effectiveness in terms of patient assessed privacy of confidential registration. Design: Randomised controlled trial. Setting: Emergency Department, University Hospital of Wales. Participants: A total of 302 patients aged over 15 years. Main outcome measures: Binary choices and ordinal visual analogue scores from a validated questionnaire on self reported measures: patient ability and preference to speak to receptionists and disclose confidential information without being overhead and concern about disclosure of items of confidential personal information. Results: Patients who registered in a screened area felt significantly more able to tell receptionists things they did not want others to hear. Control patients were significantly more concerned than intervention patients that others heard their name, address, date of birth, reason for emergency department attendance, and telephone number, but not their marital status. Overall, intervention patients were less concerned about disclosure of information and that they had been overheard. Conclusions: Patients value privacy when they register and are concerned if others can hear them tell receptionists who they are, how to contact them, and why they are there. Confidential registration should be instituted in health services. Confidential registration increased patient privacy and should be instituted in health services.
We estimated the frequency of non-specific influenza-associated clinical endpoints to inform the feasibility of pragmatic randomized controlled trials (RCT) assessing relative vaccine effectiveness (rVE). Hospitalization rates of respiratory, cardiovascular and diabetic events were estimated from Denmark and England’s electronic databases and stratified by age, comorbidity and influenza vaccination status. We included a seasonal average of 4.5 million Danish and 7.2 million English individuals, 17 and 32% with comorbidities. Annually, approximately 1% of Danish and 0.5% of English individuals were hospitalized for selected events, ~50% of them respiratory. Hospitalization rates were 40–50-fold and 2–10-fold higher in those >50 years and with comorbidities, respectively. Our findings suggest that a pragmatic RCT using non-specific endpoints is feasible. However, for outcomes with rates <2.5%, it would require randomization of ~100,000 participants to have the power to detect a rVE difference of ~13%. Targeting selected groups (older adults, those with comorbidities) where frequency of events is high would improve trial efficiency.
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