Accidents among elderly people attending the emergency departments of the University Hospitals in Alexandria

ABSTRACT

This study was conducted to describe the types of elderly accidents and their resulting injuries, estimate the mean injury severity score [ISS] among study cases and its relation to some variables and lastly to identify health problems of the elderly and their associated risk of accidents occurrence. The study included 259 elderly accident cases with a male to female ratio of 0.9 and a mean age of 71.1873 +/- 8.6387 years. More than two thirds of studied cases attended El- Hadra Hospital [68.34%]. Falls were the most common type of accidents among the study cases followed by road traffic accidents, exposure to inanimate mechanical force and lastly poisoning [66.02%, 22.01%, 7.34% and 4.63% respectively]. On the other hand, the most common types of the encountered injuries were fractures [59.80%], wounds [26.09%], joint injuries [4.01%] and intracranial injuries [2.77%]. The mean ISS of the studied cases was 11.7408 +/- 11.0361. It was significantly higher among patients who attended the Main University Hospitals [MUH] as well as victims of road traffic accidents. The health problems found to be significant predictors of elderly accidents occurrence were arthralgia, imbalance, coronary heart diseases, hypertension, chronic respiratory illnesses, incontinence of urine, dizziness, diabetes mellitus, as well as impaired vision and hearing