Infectiologie du sujet age : les progres recents Infectious diseases in the elderly: Recent improvement

摘要

Objectives. — The authors achieved a bibliography search for studies published on infections in elderly and they have underlined the difficulties seen in diagnostic and therapeutic strategies en those patients. Methods. - The authors analysed original articles published between January 2005 and November 2007 by using Medline through PubMed. This permitted to establish predominant infections, data on living conditions, nutrition, as a function of hospitalisation or nursing homes and to review the main infectious diseases with parameters to old age. Results. — Pneumonia was a dominant disease and precise studies taking into account the age ranging from 65 to 84 and underlying pathologies, showed a level of deaths higher in hospitalised patients with pneumonia. In patients hospitalised with a pneunococcal bacteremia, among 200 patients 40% were vaccinated against pneumococci and the mortality rate was only 11%. Using such models of comparisons between groups, most respiratory tract infections, viral pneumonia, leginellosis and pneumonia occurring in elderly nursing homes, data regarding therapeutic efficacy and levels of death have been established. Infectious pleuritis is a severe infectious disease and microbiologic, clinical and therapeutic measures have been analysed. Other sites of infections such as septic arthrosis, meningitis, urinary tract infection, etc. required attention due to the increased severity of these infections in elderly populations. Prosthetic infections, zoster, cat scratch disease require also specific treatments. Comments. - Such a bibliographic study merits attention since data collected in high level publications permit to establish severity, chonicity, immunologic conditions in the growing old populations before deciding hospitalisation which may aggravate the health conditions of those patients.