Grant: Project Grant

Delirium is an acute neuropsychiatric condition characterized by an altered state of consciousness and episodes of confusion and inattention. Up to 50% of hospitalized patients >60 years of age develop delirium during their hospital stay. This hospital-acquired delirium is associated with poor patient outcomes, longer hospital stay, and higher risk of developing dementia. The mechanisms of hospital-acquired delirium are not yet fully understood. As there is no effective way to treat delirium, identification of important predictors, and those patients at higher risk, could help inform optimal management and prevention strategies. Prognostic prediction models are equations that convert a combination of patient characteristics to estimate the specific risk of an individual experiencing a future problem. We plan to develop a database of individual patient data from studies of not-critically ill hospitalized older adults, to assess predictors of delirium and develop a prediction model to help explain why some patients develop delirium in hospital. This information will help clinicians and hospital administrators plan for care. We plan to gather clinicians, researchers, knowledge users in this area to develop a comprehensive list of predictors. To do this, we will perform a systematic review of prognostic studies to identify relevant studies that investigated delirium in hospitalized older adults. We will contact the authors of these studies to obtain individual patient data, which we will use to develop an database of hospitalized patients with delirium. This database will be used to develop a tool that will allow us to predict which patients are at higher risk of developing delirium. Our team is well-positioned to lead this work given that key members have led similar studies in this area. The anticipated outcomes of this project will be a database that will be used to develop a risk assessment tool that can identify hospitalized older adults at higher risk of delirium.