A collection of topics on acute geriatric care. It is based on encounters between geriatricians and consultants, meant to resolve clinical problems - a collaboration where clinical experience and interdisciplinary exchange may supplant scanty guidelines.

During the last decades as the population has become older, the demand for acute hospital care for elderly people has increased and gerontologically adjusted services have become the norm for the highest standard of care. Compared with younger adults, elderly patients have more severe illnesses, including worsened functional impairment and more frequent and longer hospitalisations. Additionally, diagnosis is often challenging because clinical presentations of common disorders may often be atypical in the elderly. When prescribing medications, physicians have to take into account the...

Practice guidelines for management of conditions prevalent in long-term geriatric care are based, by and large, on expert consensus and rarely on controlled studies. Though enforced by tradition, some of the rules often applied in clinical practice fall short of scientific foundation. In lacking high-grade scientific evidence, geriatric practice might benefit from an evidence-balanced approach. A step forward in this direction is by corroboration of observational data. In this book, we brought our share of observational data, input from our experience in geriatric care, to be merged with the...