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Delirium is highly prevalent in hospitalized patients, but clinical diagnosis can be challenging due to intrinsic fluctuations, often confounded by undetected premorbid brain dysfunction. Although delirium can be reversible, it complicates care and patient outcomes — significantly increasing hospital stays, discharges to long-term care facilities, and mortality. Thus, tools to aid early and reliable diagnosis may improve quality and reduce costs of inpatient care.
To examine the association of electroencephalogram (EEG) findings with delirium, researchers prospectively enrolled 200 nonintubated patients without dementia over 17 months at one tertiary-care academic medical center who were referred for EEG evaluation of altered mental status. …