Urinary incontinence for the primary care physician.

This article reviews the recent data on the etiology, evaluation, and treatment of urinary incontinence in older adults. While urinary incontinence remains a major problem for older people, many of these patients never receive medical evaluation or treatment. The nonspecialist can make substantial inroads into incontinence by identifying affected patients, treating medical causes of incontinence effectively, and evaluating bladder and urethral function using simple techniques.

A patient-completed screening instrument for functional disability in the elderly.

Purpose: Although multi-disciplinary geriatric assessment of elderly patients has been shown to be effective in identifying new diagnoses and previously unknown disabilities and in decreasing hospitalization and mortality, time and financial constraints prevent most internists and office practitioners from using this approach with their older patients. Several instruments to screen older persons for functional disability have been proposed, but there are limited data regarding their utility or effectiveness in clinical medicine. This study developed a short, patient-completed screening assessment instrument (the Functional Assessment Screen), compared it to a standard, multi-disciplinary geriatric evaluation, and determined the screening instrument's ability to predict future use of home care services in a group of elderly patients.