Acute Geriatric Medicine

Abstract

This book is written for physicians who will be diagnosing and treating acutely ill elderly patients on medical, surgical, and geriatric wards and in emergency departments and skilled nursing facilities. The chapters, written by British geriatricians and their surgical and medical subspecialty colleagues, deal with problems that are commonly seen in the acutely ill elderly: acute cardiac, gastrointestinal, metabolic, neurological, renal, respiratory, urologic, and vascular problems, septicemia, hypothermia, acute confusional states, emergency anesthesia, and acute gastrointestinal bleeding. In general, each chapter starts with a brief review of age-related changes and altered presentation of illness, followed by a description of the diagnosis and management of the condition under discussion. The emphasis is on the differences in approach to geriatric patients compared with middle-aged patients. Because each chapter is short, averaging only 20 pages, major clinical entities are dealt with briefly. The chapter on cardiac problems, for example, deals with the A