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Inpatient delirium is associated with numerous adverse outcomes, including mortality. Delirium also has been associated with long-term cognitive decline, but individual studies of this association have been relatively small, and any causal link between delirium and dementia remains unclear.
Researchers used Australian databases to retrospectively identify 55,000 patients (age, ≥65) with no history of dementia who had at least one episode of inpatient delirium during a 6-year index period; case patients were matched with 55,000 similar patients who were hospitalized during the same period but had no delirium. During 5 years of follow-up after the index period, both mortality and incident dementia were more common in the delirium group than in…