For patients hospitalized with COVID-19, persistent viral shedding occurs frequently and is associated with in-hospital delirium and increased six-month mortality, according to a study published online May 11 in GeroScience.
May 13, 2022
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Almost everyone has a delirium story, although they don't always know it's called that. Most will recall the experience of a grandmother, a father, a child, a friend who became very confused in hospital, and in some cases ...
Mar 15, 2017
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Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a new link between impaired brain energy metabolism and delirium—a disorienting and distressing disorder particularly common in the elderly and one that is currently ...
Jul 14, 2020
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Many older adults who have major surgery experience postoperative delirium in the days after their operations. Previous research has suggested that closely monitoring the brain during surgery and making adjustments to protect ...
Feb 5, 2019
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New research provides the best evidence to date that the late-day anxiety and agitation sometimes seen in older institutionalized adults, especially those with dementia, has a biological basis in the brain.
Jun 27, 2011
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Cedars-Sinai researchers have found that blocking the action of a protein called interleukin 6 (IL-6), part of the immune system, could resolve the delirium that often accompanies urinary tract infection (UTI) in elderly ...
Dec 6, 2021
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Marked by acute temporary confusion, disorientation and/or agitation, postoperative delirium is the most common post-surgical complication in older adults, striking as many as half of adults older than 65 who undergo high-risk ...
Nov 22, 2019
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Schizophrenia is a mental illness that seriously affects social interaction. Recent studies have shown that people with schizophrenia have difficulty in interpreting others' intentions. One of the causes has just been identified ...
Dec 27, 2011
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Ketamine was first introduced into clinical practice by investigators at the University of Michigan in the mid-1960s as a general anesthetic that could offer advantages, such a preserving breathing, not afforded by other ...
May 30, 2017
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Patients who experience low blood pressure during surgery are at increased risk for postoperative delirium, according to a large study being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2021 annual meeting.
Oct 9, 2021
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Delirium or acute confusional state is a common and severe neuropsychiatric syndrome with core features of acute onset and fluctuating course, attentional deficits and generalized severe disorganization of behavior. It typically involves other cognitive deficits, changes in arousal (hyperactive, hypoactive, or mixed), perceptual deficits, altered sleep-wake cycle, and psychotic features such as hallucinations and delusions. It is often caused by a disease process outside the brain, such as infection (urinary tract infection, pneumonia) or drug effects, particularly anticholinergics or other CNS depressants (benzodiazepines and opioids). Although hallucinations and delusions are sometimes present, these are not required for the diagnosis, and the symptoms of delirium are clinically distinct from those induced by psychosis or hallucinogens (with the exception of deliriants.)
Delirium itself is not a disease, but rather a clinical syndrome (a set of symptoms), which result from an underlying disease or new problem with mentation. Like its components (inability to focus attention, mental confusion and various impairments in awareness and temporal and spatial orientation), delirium is simply the common symptomatic manifestation of early brain or mental dysfunction (for any reason). Without careful assessment, delirium can easily be confused with a number of psychiatric disorders because many of the signs and symptoms are conditions present in dementia, depression, and psychosis.
Treatment of delirium requires treatment of the underlying causes. In some cases, temporary or palliative or symptomatic treatments are used to comfort patients or to allow better patient management (for example, a patient who, without understanding, is trying to pull out a ventilation tube that is required for survival). Delirium is probably the single most common acute disorder affecting adults in general hospitals. It affects 10-20% of all hospitalized adults, and 30-40% of elderly hospitalized patients and up to 80% of ICU patients.
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