Turkish Journal of
GERIATRICS

GATA HEH İç Hastalıkları Servisi, İstanbul Background: It has been advised for elder patients to hospitalize in the intermediate care services in the report of UK King's Fund Institute, in 1992. It is certain to be investigated current status of the intensive care units before setting up such an unit. So, we aimed to study attributes, mortality and staying period of >65 years old patients, hospitalized in our Intensive Care Unit of Internal Medicine Department. Material and Method: The study was realized retrospectively on 1219 (509 female and 710 male) patients, admitted to Intensive Care Unit of Internal Medicine between 1/1/2000 and 3/15/2001. Cases were classified under 11 topics and, evaluated according to hospitalized period and mortality. Results: 548 patients were >65 years old. The percentage of elderly patients to all was 44.95%. The patients, who were hospitalized for gastrointestinal bleeding, formed the biggest group (21.4%) according to admission. Cardiovascular system diseases (20.6%), oncology related diseases (12.2%), diabetes mellitus (10.6%), chronic renal failure (9.3%), infection (8.8%), chronic obstructive lung disease 4.0%, hypertension 3.5%, deep anemia 2.9%, pulmonary emboli 1.3%, others 5.5% were chased respectively. 123 cases (22.44%) of 548 patients >65 was mortal. Average staying period in intensive care unit was 7.4±3.7 days. No significant relation was determined between the staying period and mortality (p>0.05). Conclusion: As it can be seen in our results, despite low main mortality of our population, ratio of oncology related patient's mortality was high such as 59.7%. At the same time, that result creates a great monetary expense and reduces morale motivation of persons who works at those units. So, the most important result, obtained from our study, is the intermediate care unit need of not only elder patients but also all terminal patients. Keywords : Elderly, Intensive Care Unit, Mortality