[Prescribing guidance pocket chart on the initiation of warfarin therapy in a geriatric hospital: a useful but challenging tool].

Elderly patients are at high risk of over-anticoagulation and of haemorrhagic risk when on warfarin, especially during treatment induction. In Charles Foix Hospital, a 800-bed geriatric hospital, we specifically developed for in-patients older than 70 years (target INR 2.5) a simple low-dose warfarin induction regimen.

[Medicalization of information systems in Internal Medicine and Geriatrics: a true medical challenge].

Elderly people constitute an ever growing part of short-stay hospital patients. At the moment, 25% of these patients age aged 75 or more. The demographic curve, the effect of public health policies favouring treatment at home and the new characteristics of demand for care by the oldest patients will undoubtedly result in an increasing number of these hospitalizations.

[Dementia syndrome and intercurrent pathologies in the elderly. A study of 100 patients over 75 years of age in a geriatrics internal medicine unit].

Elderly people with dementia are admitted in ever increasing number to Internal Medicine units for exploration of dementia and treatment of intercurrent diseases. The purpose of this prospective study of 100 demential subjects aged 75 or more (mean: 85.3 +/- 5.

[Hospitalization in internal medicine of nonagenarians. Study of 150 cases].

Very elderly patients represent an increasing rate of hospitalized patients in internal medicine unit. Their admission and discharge modes, their morbidity and explaining factors for length of stay are still bad knowned. This prospective study concerns 150 patients stays, over 90, in an internal medicine and geriatric unit.

[Polypathology and co-morbidity: a dynamic way for describing morbidity in aged patients. Study of 100 patients, aged 80 and over, in a short-stay geriatric internal medicine unit].

Descriptive epidemiology has demonstrated the increase with age of the number of identifiable diseases per subject. However, the clinical relevance of this polypathology varies according to the type of affliction, and all pathologies are not necessarily implicated in all morbid events. This prospective study analyzed the length of hospitalization (mean stay: 17.

[Properties of drug complications in elderly patients].

Adverse reactions to drugs are characteristically more frequent and more severe in elderly people as a result of factors that are found exclusively in this category of patients, such as multiple diseases, multiple medications, multiple prescribers, self-medication, age-related changes in pharmacokinetics and patient's compliance. Clinically, these reactions are atypical, often mixed, and they may take their symptoms from some other disease decompensated by the adverse reaction. The frequency of this iatropathology in elderly patients is such that it must systematically be suspected in the presence of any pathological episode.