Grant: PRIZE - Pro. Gr. - PA: Yves Joanette Award of Excellence in Research in Aging

Vital signs are used everyday by healthcare professionals to quickly screen and assess the health status of patients. Heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen level are the backbone of clinical management by informing how sick a person might be and how urgently care must be provided. However, vital signs and normal reference ranges currently used in older adults were developed many decades ago using the health characteristics of a younger population. As the Canadian population is aging, the appropriateness of current vitals signs and their reference ranges that would best inform triage and care has not been evaluated in contemporary older adults. Our research has three objectives. First, rather than relying on "normal" values from the overall population of adults, we seek to identify reference range for vital signs that are specific to older age groups and to each older adult individually. Second, instead of using unique values of vital signs, we will investigate whether different ways of combining multiple values over time (modelling) can improve the predictive performance of vital signs. Finally, we expand the health characteristics and type of data considered as vital signs: blood test results may function as vital signs. We will examine whether and how these types of data can be best accounted for and used in clinical care as novel geriatric vital signs. Vital signs are at the core of clinical management. Tailoring and expanding vital signs to the needs and specificities of the growing older adult population has the potential to be vastly alter and improve the care of older adults.