Dehydration is a poorly defined and applied term. Many disciplines deal with frail elders prone to dehydration with reasonable consensus on risk factors, but there is far less agreement on what constitutes clinical dehydration and how to best treat it. This is especially true when the survey process is involved, where dehydration is considered a sentinel event. The American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs noted in 1995 that there is no absolute definition of dehydration and that signs and symptoms in the elderly may be unreliable and even absent.1 In this issue of the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA), Thomas et al propose new guidelines for diagnosis and management of dehydration.
展开▼
