Abstract
Diagnoses recorded in the chapter E of Minimum Data Set (MDS) were analyzed in patients requiring care admitted in a geriatric hospital in Sapporo, Japan. They were classified as: A-diseases causing care-requiring conditions, B-their symptoms, and C-coexisting diseases requiring no care. Orthopedic diseases were not analyzed because they were not adequately recorded in MDS system.
Class A diagnoses varied, but only five diagnoses were responsible for 3% or more of the total patients who required care. They were 1) Alzheimer's disease (AD), 2) Parkinson's disease, 3) dementia other than AD without neurological symptoms, 4) dementia other than AD with sequelae of stroke, and 5) sequelae of stroke without dementia. These diagnoses pooled represented over 90% of all patients.
“Diagnoses and symptoms” in MDS were useful to 1) describe medical problems briefly in a predetermined format, 2) evaluate urgent or unstable conditions separately from stable diagnoses and symptoms, and 3) use common information by various professions, but have difficulties because 1) preselected diagnoses were few and unsuited to practices in Japan, 2) it is impossible to record a previous disease in the past that initiated the process leading to the present disabilities, and 3) it is also impossible to record the seventies of the diseases and symptoms.
