Clinical research studyDiagnosis of Pulmonary Malignancy after Hospitalization for Pneumonia
Section snippets
Methods
For this study we used data from the administrative databases of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System. These databases are the repositories of clinical data from all of the VA hospitals and outpatient clinics.5 The Institutional Review Board of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio approved this study under expedited review.
Results
We identified 40,744 patients who met the inclusion criteria and who did not have a diagnosis of pulmonary malignancy before the pneumonia hospitalization. The mean age was 77.7 years, SD 6.8 years; 53.0% of subjects were married and 98.1% were male. In this cohort, 10.5% were black, 66.6% were white, 1.5% were Hispanic, 4.6% were other, and 16.8% were of unknown race/ethnicity. Regarding mortality, 12.9% (n = 5270) of the subjects died within 30 days of admission, and 20.7% (n = 8451) died within
Discussion
We found that a small, but clinically important, number of elderly patients with pneumonia are diagnosed with posthospitalization pulmonary malignancy. Our results support the concept of follow-up imaging for elderly patients with pneumonia. However, as this is a retrospective study, we are unable to comment on the appropriate time frame or imaging modality (eg, chest radiograph, computed tomography of the chest).
In our study we found that there were significant differences in several comorbid
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Funding: The project described was supported by Grant Number R01NR010828 from the National Institute of Nursing Research. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Nursing Research or the National Institutes of Health. This material is the result of work supported with resources and the use of facilities at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System. Dr Copeland is funded by Merit Review Entry Program grant MRP-05-145 from the VA Health Services Research and Development program. Dr. Restrepo is funded by a KL2 of the National Institutes of Health and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The funding agencies had no role in conducting the study, or role in the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.
Conflict of Interest: None of the authors have any conflicts of interests to disclose regarding this article.
Authorship: All authors had free access to the data and were actively involved in writing the manuscript.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs.