JAMA internal medicine
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JAMA internal medicine · Apr 2015
Functional trajectories among older persons before and after critical illness.
Little is known about functional trajectories of older persons in the year before and after admission to the intensive care unit (ICU) or how pre-ICU functional trajectories affect post-ICU functional trajectories and death. ⋯ Among older persons with critical illness, more than half died within 1 month or experienced significant functional decline over the following year, with particularly poor outcomes in those who had high levels of premorbid disability. These results may help to inform discussions about prognosis and goals of care before and during critical illness.
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JAMA internal medicine · Apr 2015
Randomized Controlled TrialMindfulness meditation and improvement in sleep quality and daytime impairment among older adults with sleep disturbances: a randomized clinical trial.
Sleep disturbances are most prevalent among older adults and often go untreated. Treatment options for sleep disturbances remain limited, and there is a need for community-accessible programs that can improve sleep. ⋯ The use of a community-accessible MAPs intervention resulted in improvements in sleep quality at immediate postintervention, which was superior to a highly structured SHE intervention. Formalized mindfulness-based interventions have clinical importance by possibly serving to remediate sleep problems among older adults in the short term, and this effect appears to carry over into reducing sleep-related daytime impairment that has implications for quality of life.
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JAMA internal medicine · Apr 2015
Hospital ward antibiotic prescribing and the risks of Clostridium difficile infection.
Only a portion of hospital-acquired Clostridium difficile infections can be traced back to source patients identified as having symptomatic disease. Antibiotic exposure is the main risk factor for C difficile infection for individual patients and is also associated with increased asymptomatic shedding. Contact with patients taking antibiotics within the same hospital ward may be a transmission risk factor for C difficile infection, but this hypothesis has never been tested. ⋯ Among hospital inpatients, ward-level antibiotic prescribing is associated with a statistically significant and clinically relevant increase in C difficile risk that persists after adjustment for differences in patient-level antibiotic use and other patient- and ward-level risk factors. These data strongly support the use of antibiotic stewardship as a means of preventing C difficile infection.
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JAMA internal medicine · Apr 2015
Comparative StudyPrescription opioid duration of action and the risk of unintentional overdose among patients receiving opioid therapy.
The unprecedented increase in unintentional overdose events that has occurred in tandem with escalating sales of prescription opioids over the past 2 decades has raised concerns about whether the therapeutic use of opioids has contributed to increases in overdose injury. Few controlled studies have examined the extent to which ecologic measures of increases in opioid prescribing and overdose injuries reflect risk among patients prescribed opioids, let alone whether some opioid regimens are safer than others. ⋯ To our knowledge, the findings of the present study provide the first evidence that the risk of unintentional overdose injury is related to the prescribed opioid's duration of action. If replicated in other cohorts, our findings suggest that clinicians weighing the benefits and risks of initiating different opioid regimens should consider not only the daily dose prescribed but also the duration of opioid action, favoring short-acting agents whenever possible, especially during the first 2 weeks of therapy.
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JAMA internal medicine · Apr 2015
Functional impairment and hospital readmission in Medicare seniors.
Medicare currently penalizes hospitals for high readmission rates for seniors but does not account for common age-related syndromes, such as functional impairment. ⋯ Functional impairment is associated with increased risk of 30-day all-cause hospital readmission in Medicare seniors, especially those admitted for heart failure, myocardial infarction, or pneumonia. Functional impairment may be an important but underaddressed factor in preventing readmissions for Medicare seniors.