Hospital Delirium: Cognitive Decline After Hospitalization
In the expected course of treatment, people are hospitalized because they are ill. Then, barring a terminal condition, they are released because they are better. Once home, people recover further, and continue on with their lives as well as their original illness allows them to. Unfortunately, with elderly people, this best case scenario doesn’t always happen.
Cognitive Decline Following Hospitalization: Sometimes a senior experiences a noticeable cognitive decline post-hospitalization. Families and caregivers are left wanting to know what happened and wondering if their loved one will ever be cognitively the same as they were before hospitalization. Each case is unique, but according to many studies, the cognitive functioning of some elders may not fully recover from the trauma.
Why are some elders subject to returning home from a hospitalization cognitively worse? Experts are studying this problem with varying results, but many agree that there are multiple conditions at play which can result in an elderly person suffering cognitive decline after a hospitalization. Although there is no conclusive evidence that a hospitalization can lead to dementia, the medical community calls the condition “hospital delirium,” a condition that the American Geriatrics Society estimates affects about one-third of patients over 70, particularly those who are in intensive care or who undergo surgery.
A Personal Experience: My first encounter with this happened many years ago. My dad went into surgery to relieve pressure on his brain caused by fluid buildup behind scar tissue from a World War II injury. Dad went into surgery after being told that it would prevent dementia. He came out of surgery in a severe state of dementia that was never explained. The dementia remained until he died, a decade later.
Seeing my intelligent, gentle, funny dad turn into another man in a matter of hours was life changing. Almost worse, however, was the blank look of the doctors who insisted that dad was “no different” than before the surgery, even though they prescribed a powerful psychoactive drug post surgery, with no logical explanation for why he now “needed” the drug.
Was It a Surgeon’s Mistake, the Hospital Environment or the Anesthetic? While my dad’s surgery was brain surgery, and the surgeon could have slipped up, many of the people who write about cognitive decline after hospitalization say their parents didn’t even undergo surgery. They were hospitalized for an infection, or a lung ailment or a diabetes complication. They were cognitively stable, even sharp, other than their illness. Cognitive changes became evident…
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