Pneumonia

Some of the risk factors for community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) in the elderly include alcoholism, asthma, and immunosuppression. For nursing home–acquired pneumonia, common risk factors include profound disability, old age, and male gender among others. Prognosis is especially poor for patients who are bedridden prior to the onset of pneumonia, those with a swallowing disorder or acute renal failure, or those with a respiratory rate greater than thirty breaths per minute. The mortality rates from pneumonia in elderly persons can be very high. The overall mortality rate for persons requiring admission to hospital for treatment of pneumonia ranges from 8 to 20 percent. The one-year mortality rate among nursing home patients following an episode of pneumonia is up to 40 percent. The major reason for these high mortality rates is due to the presence of various comorbid illnesses. For many elderly persons who have advanced Alzheimer's disease, strokes, and other illnesses, pneumonia is often the terminal event.

There is a high incidence of silent aspiration in elderly persons with community-acquired pneumonia. Kikuchi and colleagues examined the role of silent aspiration during sleep in elderly patients with CAP and found that 71 percent of the study patients aspirated compared with 10 percent of the control subjects. Just over 28 percent of patients with Alzheimer's disease and 51 percent of those with a stroke aspirated on videofluoroscopy. Croghan and others found that feeding tube placement in patients shown to aspirate on videofluoroscopy was associated with increased rate of pneumonia and death compared with those who aspirated but did not receive such a tube.