Repeated Pulmonary Aspiration in the Aged Demented Patients

Abstract

We investigated the aged demented inpatients who had repeated aspiration in our hospital during a period of 21 months from July 1997. Subjects are 60 patients aged from 65 to 94. We investigated the clinical background of the subjects, dividing them into the group with pneumonia and the group without pneumonia, and compared their type of dementia, grade of dementia, underlying diseases, laboratory data, diet, and outcome. We further compared the effect of mucoid diet for pneumonia. The most comon underlying diseases were hypertension, cerebrovascular disease, diseases of the digestive system, and malignant tumor.
There was no statistically significant difference in the outcome of the two groups. Within the subjects, death due to pneumonia was statistically significantly less in patients who had a mucoid diet. These findings suggested that a mucoid diet is useful for the protection against death caused by aspiration pneumonia.