Place And Characteristics Of Patients Older Than 85 Managed By Mobile Palliative Care Team; A Retrospective Study

The objectives of this study was to specify the place of the patients older than 85 in the activity of the Mobile health unit of the Hospital of Metz-Thionville, to determine their characteristics and to show possible care differences as compared with younger patients. This is a retrospective study concerning all the patients seen by the Mobile health unit in 2006 and 2007. The patients older than 85 represent 11% of the 652 patients followed by the Unit and 7.8% of the 2.436 consultations on the study period. The older patients have a WHO mean score significantly higher and a Karnofsky mean score significantly lower than the younger subjects. Their survival rate tends to be lower but not significantly. Cancers are less frequent in older patients and they have fewer consultations than younger ones. The older patients present fewer communication problems and less often pain than the younger patients. The prescriptions of non-opioid and opioid analgesics, steroids or antiepileptic drugs (used as analgesics) are less frequent in the older patients. The results of this study showed some specificities of palliative care in the older patients: we observed a great variety of pathologies and a lower frequency of cancers than in younger patients, various places of care, difficulties to evaluate the symptoms or to treat them due to communication problems especially. If these specificities are real, they do not seem to have important repercussions on following since the group of the patients older than 85 and the one of the younger patients differ only little in terms of survival rate or mean number of consultations.