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Senior Citizen Health & Medicine
Sharp Decline in Hospital Death Rates Good News for
Aging Senior Citizens
Death rates from heart attack, five other leading
conditions decline in 2004
 Oct. 12, 2007 Certainly good news for aging
seniors citizens, sharp declines in the hospital death rates of patients
from heart attack and five other leading conditions were revealed in new
statistics on 2004. This means an estimated 136,000 who would have died
had they been hospitalized a decade earlier survived their stays in
2004, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality.
For every 1,000 patients admitted for their
condition:
● Heart attack deaths fell by 43; deaths from
congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and stroke each dropped roughly 30;
deaths from gastrointestinal hemorrhage declined by 21; and 16 fewer
died from hip fracture.
AHRQ compared the death rates for 1994 and 2004 for
patients who were hospitalized for heart attack, congestive heart
failure, stroke, pneumonia, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, or hip
fracture.
For every 1,000 patients who underwent six surgical
procedures examined:
● Abdominal aortic aneurysm repair deaths plunged
from 103 to 74;
● Deaths from craniotomy an operation for brain
lesions and other conditions declined from 83 to 68;
● Deaths from heart bypass surgery fell from 48
to 28, angioplasty deaths diminished from 16 to 12, those from carotid
endarterectomy an operation to avert stroke fell from 12 to 7, and
● Deaths from hip replacement surgery declined by
half from 4 to 2 per every 1,000 operations.
The death rates for the six conditions and six
surgical procedures are risk-adjusted, meaning that AHRQs researchers
took into account differences in how ill patients were over time when
calculating the results.
This AHRQ News and Numbers is based on data in
Trends in Hospital Risk-Adjusted Mortality for Select Diagnoses and
Procedures, 1994-2004. The report uses statistics from the
Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a database of hospital inpatient stays that
is nationally representative of inpatient stays in all short-term,
non-Federal hospitals.
The data are drawn from hospitals that comprise 90
percent of all discharges in the United States and include all patients,
regardless of insurance type, as well as the uninsured. The authors used
AHRQs Inpatient Quality Indicators to determine the in-hospital,
risk-adjusted death rates.
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