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Senior Health & Medicine
Senior Citizens Were 33 Percent of Hospital
Admissions in 2003
Elderly also
accounted for close to half (44%) of hospital charges
Although only 12 percent of the U.S. population was
age 65 and older in 2003, they accounted for one-third of all patients
admitted to the nations community hospitals in that year over 13
million hospital stays, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research.
The most common treatment for senior citizens were blood transfusions.
The elderly also accounted for 44 percent of all
hospital charges nearly $329 billion.
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The most common procedure performed on elderly
patients was blood transfusion. Sixty percent of all blood transfusions
almost 1.2 million were for the elderly. Nearly one of every 11
elderly patients in the hospital received a transfusion.
The second, third, fourth and fifth most commonly
performed procedures in the hospital for the elderly were, respectively,
diagnostic cardiac catheterization and coronary arteriography (852,300),
upper gastrointestinal endoscopy and biopsy (690,700), respiratory
intubation and mechanical ventilation (500,900) and percutaneous
coronary angioplasty (401,900).
The five leading reasons why elderly patients were
hospitalized, by number of admissions, were congestive heart failure
(839,300), pneumonia (770,400), coronary atherosclerosis or hardening of
the arteries (675,700), cardiac dysrhythmias (484,200) and acute
myocardial infarction or heart attack (449,000).
The proportion of elderly patients who died while
hospitalized was five times higher than that of younger patients.
The AHR also reported Americas community hospitals
treated nearly 210,000 patients for alcohol abuse disorders in 2003 at a
cost of about $2 billion. Twenty-five percent of these stays that were
primarily for alcohol abuse disorders involved Medicaid patients, 21
percent involved uninsured patients, 13 percent were for Medicare
patients, and 34 percent were for privately insured patients.
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.
These and other data are in Hospitalizations in the
Elderly Population, 2003, HCUP Statistical Brief # 6 at
http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs.jsp. The report uses
statistics from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a database of hospital
inpatient stays that is nationally representative of all short-term,
non-federal hospitals.
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