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Clinical characteristics of older adults with community-acquired pneumonia

Abstract:

Community-acquired pneumonia is a common infectious disease that causes substantial morbidity and mortality. Elderly people are frequently affected, and several issues related to care of this condition in the elderly have to be considered. The most common pathogen in this pathology is still Streptococcus pneumoniae, followed by other pathogens such as Haemophilus influenzae, Mycoplasma pneumonia. The objective of this study was to determine the clinical characteristics of older adults with this disease in hospital “Alfredo Noboa Montenegro”. For the qualitative variables the absolute frequency and the percent were used. For the association between qualitative variables, the Chi-square independence test was used. In the case of the 2x2 contingency tables, when Fisher had an expected cell shorter than 5, Fisher's exact test was used. More than 54% of the patients studied were classified as grade II; of them, the highest percentage (66.7%) corresponded to men. Next in order of frequency was grade III with 25% and about 83% was female. There was no statistical association between sex and the degree of the patients studied, so we could say that both variables were independent. In the majority of cases, patients are diagnosed from the primary care levels when they are confused with other types of pathologies, which causes a delay in the identification and treatment of the patient that in the future influences a negative prognosis.