View clinical trials related to Delirium Confusional State.
Filter by:As the population of older adults increases, so too with the number of older adult patients that present for anesthesia and surgery. The development of delirium following surgery has some significant potential effects on patient outcomes; however, POD is often under diagnosed. Some studies reported that more than 50% of patients with delirium were undiagnosed by clinical teams. POD is associated with cognitive decline, increased hospital length of stay, discharge to institutional care, mortality and higher healthcare costs. POD contributes significantly to healthcare inefficiency; a diagnosis of POD is estimated by the Australian Commission on Quality and Safety in Healthcare to cost an additional $27,791 AUD. The incidence of POD reported in clinical trials depends on the risk profile of the study population, the frequency and duration of delirium assessments as well as the surgical procedure. Reported incidence may also vary due to the presence of high-risk pathways involving multi-specialty management and intervention. POD may present as either hyperactive or hypoactive subtypes, the latter being more difficult to detect. There are few reports on the incidence of POD in New Zealand national level datasets, with single centre studies primarily looking at in-hospital delirium and demonstrating an incidence of 11.2 to 29% on mixed and/or medical wards. A review of elderly patients with neck-of-femur fractures found the incidences of POD to be as high as 39%. The current data suggests a significant level of morbidity due to POD in New Zealand hospitals, however there is lack of national level data in the surgical population; which is crucial for establishing demographic and regional need for effective intervention.
Delirium is defined as an acute change in mental status characterized by fluctuating disturbances of consciousness, attention, cognition, and perception, usually secondary to acute injuries such as trauma or infections. Delirium is more frequent in older adults, and is associated with important poor clinical outcomes including increased mortality, functional deterioration, and higher expenditures for healthcare systems. Although it is not the only one responsible, the inflammatory response plays a key role in the development of delirium. From the first descriptions of the condition 2500 years ago, it is known that patients who present with inflammatory injuries such as trauma (pe. hip fracture) or infections (sepsis), frequently develop delirium. Microglia, are an inflammatory cell with phagocytic capacity, that inhabit the nervous system and have a critical role in the regulation of the inflammatory response in the brain. It is known that microglia have receptors that respond to systemic inflammatory mediators by generating new inflammatory mediators that exert their effect on other glial cells and neurons in the central nervous system, affecting their function. Mouse models have shown that depleting the brain of microglia prevents cognitive decline after a traumatic bone injury, suggesting a role of these cells in the development of delirium. Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1 (PARP-1) is a nuclear enzyme that participates in DNA repair, and in the regulation of the expression of inflammatory mediators by immune cell. In vitro experiments have shown that PARP-1 enhances the microglial response to inflammation, and data from mice exposed to the bacterial component "lipo-poly-saccharide (LPS)", a classical model of delirium, showed that pharmacological inhibition of PARP-1 prevents cognitive decline secondary to that injury. Interestingly, nicotinamide, a vitamin widely available in the market, with a well-known safety profile in humans, is a well-recognized inhibitor of PARP-1. The role of PARP-1 nor nicotinamide in delirium has never been explored. Considering that, 1) there is evidence showing that PARP-1 may act as an enhancer of the inflammatory response of microglia and 2) the protective effect against cognitive impairment produced by pharmacological inhibition of PARP-1 in a mice model of delirium, we propose as hypothesis that PARP-1 participates in delirium pathogenesis by enhancing microglial activation in response to systemic inflammation. To address this hypothesis in patients, we propose to determine in a randomized clinical trial whether nicotinamide, a pharmacological inhibitor of PARP-1, is more effective than placebo for the prevention of delirium in older adults with requirement of oxygen (non-invasive) and suspected coronavirus disease (COVID-19) under study. The results of this research will contribute significantly in the field of delirium, improving the knowledge of its physiopathology, as well with the development of of new alternatives for its prevention in clinical practice.
Currently physicians and nurses rely on their own clinical skills and experience to diagnose and record 'delirium' in the Electronic Health Records (EHR). This study aims to determine how delirium as a diagnosis is documented by clinicians in the EHR at Hadassah Hospital. The knowledge gained from this study will support the design of a better surveillance approach to monitoring delirium events in postoperative patients using electronic healthcare recorded data. There is considerable uncertainty surrounding the quality of 'delirium' records in the Electronic Health Records (EHR). The reliability of this chart estimation has become questionable in the absence of an objective definition of 'delirium' and a lack of highly accurate diagnostic tools in the hospital setting. Given the difficulty of accurately identifying delirium and the deficiency in the quality of EHR documentation, it is not surprising that delirium is grossly underestimated, undertreated, not properly recorded in the EHR or misreported. Data concordance plays a major role in documentation quality, especially for data-mining and knowledge extraction analysis, and therefore it is essential to address the reliability of 'delirium' labeled data within the EHR system.