Possible Connection Found Between Delirium and Dementia in Recent Study

This is the report from a new retrospective study initiated in partnership with researchers from the AIHI at Macquarie University in Australia and the UQ in Queensland. 

This study analyzed anonymized hospital records for more than 110,000 individuals aged over 65 from New South Wales who were under care within 11 years, unveiling a relationship between delirium and de.

In the recent issue of the British Medical Journal, a study found that the patients who had one or more episodes of delirium had greatly the numbers of the patients who had not experienced delirium and later developed dementia.

Delirium is the general name of the sudden changes in a person's mental condition, and the presence of disorientation and confusion recognizes this state. It can be a frequent occurrence in hospitalized patients during their older age. Studies have shown that it affects about 40 percent of the population above 80.

Toward these results, the research group extracted a huge data set of records from public and private hospitals from 2001-2020, only to narrow them down to particular dates.

Therefore, participating operated wards listed patients who had at least one incidence of delirium while being admitted to the hospital. Every pair included a counterpart (of the same age and sex) but hadn't suffered from delirium; this gave scientists 55,211 partners from which they could follow over five years.

One out of three delirium patients studied went on to be diagnosed with dementia as opposed to only one out of a hundred of the control group that did not experience delirium. For each time a patient suffers from delirium, it has been found that the risk of developing dementia has been 20 percent higher.