2Özel Bilgi Hastanesi İç Hastalıkları KONYA Introduction: The world's population is ageing and living a healthy life is becoming more important. The presence of multiple concurrent diseases has significant effects on quality of life, mortality, and healthcare utilization of elderly individuals. We aimed to examine the diseases in the elderly, the number of concurrent diseases, if the number of diseases increased with age and variation of the diseases by age and gender in an internal medicine outpatient clinic.
Materials and Method: In this study, medical records of all consecutive patients over 65 admitted to an internal medicine outpatient clinic between 2005 and 2006 were examined retrospectively.
Results: Six hundred and nineteen elderly patients were identified in this period, representing 14.2% of all patients. The mean age of the study population was 73.1±6.04 years (males; 73.81±6.45, and females; 72.53±5.64). Diseases of the cardiovascular system were the most prevalent diagnostic category (n=460, 74.3%). Only 27.6% of the elderly had a single diagnosable disease entity; the rest had at least two or more concurrent diseases. Regarding concurrent diseases, the younger elderly group (65-74 years) was not different from the elder elderly group (≥75 years) (p>0.05).
Conclusion: The risk of having multiple concurrent diseases did not differ significantly with age in this study population. It was noteworthy that mean age of men was higher than that of women.
Keywords : Ageing, Co-morbidities, Chronic disease