Drugs, Delirium and Older People

Psychotherapy: A tool to prevent postoperative delirium?

The value of psychotherapy in surgical patients suffering from postoperative delirium is unclear. Options for the treatment of established postoperative delirium are few; therapy largely relies on the avoidance of postoperative delirium facilitating factors, like specific drugs and environmental factors in the perioperative setting. Established medical therapies' efficacy in terms of decreasing incidence of postoperative delirium is very low. The aim of this project is to suggest new therapeutic options in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy as a possible preventive and psychotherapeutic treatment of postoperative delirium. Life expectancy in developed countries increases worldwide and both the need for surgical treatment and the probability of postoperative delirium occurrence increase with age. Due to the necessity of addressing the individual's negative consequences of postoperative delirium and to optimise socioeconomical needs, new therapeutic options for the treatment of postoperative delirium are desperately needed.

Development of a Prediction Model for Diagnosis of Acute Poisoning in Patients with Altered Mental Status and Absent History of Alcohol/Drug Ingestion

BACKGROUND

Diagnosis of acute poisoning in patients with altered mental status and absent history is a challenging diagnostic problem in clinical practice.

OBJECTIVE

The aims of the study were to develop a simple clinical tool to stratify risk of acute poisoning in patients with altered mental states and no history of alcohol/drug ingestion, and develop a prediction model using initial observations from which a simple risk score could be derived.

METHODS

The study was carried out on non-trauma patients aged 15 years and older admitted with altered mental states and no history of alcohol or drug ingestion. Univariate analysis and logistic regression were carried out and a score was derived and validated.

RESULTS

There were 607 patients included, with mean age of 60.3 years and 54% were male. The regression model performed moderately well on both the training and validation sets with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.834 and 0.844, respectively. The risk score correlated with the regression model (R² = 0.969). At cutoff thresholds of 20% for the model and 2 for the score, sensitivity and specificity of the regression model (67.6% and 85.6%) and the score (67.6% and 85.4%) were moderate, while positive predictive values were low (43.4%) and negative predictive values were high (94.2%) for both the regression model and the score.

CONCLUSIONS

A prediction model with a derived risk score was developed with a high negative predictive value and may have potential in assessing risk of poisoning in altered mental status and may have value in a prehospital environment or at triage.

Postoperative delirium in elderly citizens and current practice

Postoperative delirium (POD) represents an acute brain dysfunction in the postsurgical period. Perioperative physicians caring for the older adults are familiar with the care of dysfunction of organs such as lungs, heart, liver, or kidney in the perioperative setting, but they are less familiar with management of brain dysfunction. As early detection and prompt treatment of inciting factors are utmost important to prevent or minimize the deleterious outcomes of delirium. The purpose of this review is to prepare perioperative physicians with a set of current clinical practice recommendations to provide optimal perioperative care of older adults, with a special focus on specific perioperative interventions that have been shown to prevent POD. On literature search in EMBASE, CINAHL, and PUBMED between January 2000 and September 2015 using search words delirium, POD, acute postoperative confusion, and brain dysfunction resulted in 9710 articles. Among them, 73 articles were chosen for review, in addition, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines, American Geriatric Society guidelines, hospital elderly life program-confusion assessment method training manual, New York geriatric nursing protocols, World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision classification of mental disorders, Food and Drug Administration requests boxed warnings on older class of antipsychotic drugs 2008 and delirium in Miller's text book of anesthesia were reviewed and relevant information presented in this article.