Disease Presentation

Learning how disease presents in adults is the cornerstone of traditional teaching of those in the medical profession and other health care professionals. Health care practitioners learn that each disease has a specific set of signs and symptoms and are trained to sort through all of this information to come up with the most likely diagnosis for each set of signs and symptoms. Different diseases are classified and subsequently taught according to the different body systems and the symptom complexes in which they present. Scanning any medical textbook would confirm this method of organization, as each chapter usually deals with different body systems and the diseases that affect it.

Using this model of diagnosis would suggest that if an older adult is having difficulty walking, the health care professional would most likely assume that the causative disease should be related to the bones, muscles, or nerves that allow them to walk. In this scenario an accurate diagnosis of a broken hip may be made using traditional diagnostic approaches. However, in the older frail adult the diagnosis could as easily be heart failure or influenza as a broken hip. This emphasizes the importance of the need for an understanding of atypical disease symptoms in older adults, particularly those who are frail.