Advance care planning and advance directives: an overview of the main critical issues.

Advance care planning (ACP) is a process that guarantees the respect of the patient's values and priorities about his/her future care at the end of life. It consists of multiple conversations with the health professional that may lead to the completion of Advance Directives (AD), a set of legal documents helpful to clinicians and family members for making critical decisions on behalf of the patient, whereas he/she might become incapable. Over the past years, ACP has become particularly relevant for the growth of chronic diseases, the increase in life expectancy, and the growing attention paid to the patient's decisional autonomy.

The relationship among frailty, delirium and attentional tests to detect delirium: a cohort study.

Background: Few studies explored if frailty predisposes to delirium in hospitalized older patients. The aims of this study were to evaluate if frailty: 1) is independently associated with delirium, and 2) affects the patient's performance in three tests of attention used to detect delirium.

Methods: Data are from a prospective cohort study of patients admitted to an Acute Geriatric Unit (AGU).