The question doctors could ask to estimate death risk in old patients

 Don't let your incompetent? doctor let you leave the hospital until you have 100% recovered your walking. My fall risk still exists because my hamstring does not fire properly to lift the foot high enough to clear obstacles. And spasticity still has me circumducting a fair amount yet, which is only useful on flat surfaces.

COMPLETE DOCTOR FAILURE THERE!

My doctor always asks me that question; 'Do you fall?'  My answer; 'Of course I do, I challenge myself a lot in walking on unimproved trails in the nearby woods. That challenge is what is going to keep me walking everywhere well into my nineties.' S/he doesn't like that answer. Just like not liking my purchase of a 4 level condo.

The question doctors could ask to estimate death risk in old patients

“Do you have trouble walking?” could be one of the most important questions doctors could ask older patients to evaluate their mortality risk, according to a new large-scale research review.

Healthcare systems worldwide seek to find simple ways to identify older adults with a high need for hospitalisation.

Hospitals also need to assess whether their healthcare response is distributed according to need rather than social position.

Previous studies have established that grip strength, gait, and balance can predict the risk of chronic diseases in older people.

Now, a new study reveals that walking difficulty can also be a practical sign of higher mortality risk and health need.

In the research, scientists assessed data from six of the world’s largest ageing studies, including health information from older adults living in China, England, the United States, South Korea, Mexico, and continental Europe.

The studies collectively followed hundreds of thousands of older adults using comparable questionnaires, which included questions about walking difficulty.

By analysing this data, scientists could probe whether walking difficulty indeed determined health status in older people across economies, cultures, and health systems.

Walking difficulty is inexpensive to ascertain and widely harmonisable across ageing cohorts, but its value as a denominator for healthcare equity assessment has been less well characterised,” researchers wrote.

They found that walking difficulty could be used to identify populations with substantially greater measured health need.

Scientists found that older adults who reported walking difficulty faced nearly double the death risk during follow-up than those who walked comfortably.

“Walking difficulty was associated with morbidity, falls, depressive symptoms, disability, and hospitalisation,” they wrote in the study published in the journal BMC Medicine.

“In clinical and community-facing settings, the value of a walking-difficulty question lies in its simplicity rather than in technological precision. It can be asked quickly, requires no equipment, and identifies a group in which multi-morbidity, depressive symptoms, falls, disability, and hospitalisation are more common,” researchers explained.

However, they caution that the study does not estimate a causal effect of walking difficulty.

“Taken within these boundaries, walking difficulty offers a practical way to move from risk recognition to health-system auditing in older populations,” researchers said.

“It identifies a high-need group using a low-cost functional question and makes it possible to ask whether response among those with evident need remains socially patterned,” they explained.

The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.