Nursing Home Use Across The Spectrum of Cognitive Decline: Merging Mayo Clinic Study of Aging With CMS MDS Assessments

Risk of Nursing Home Use among Older Americans: The Impact of Psychiatric History and Trajectories of Cognitive Function

OBJECTIVE

Mental illness and cognitive functioning may be independently associated with nursing home use. We investigated the strength of the association between baseline (1998) psychiatric history, eight-year cognitive function trajectories, and prospective incidence of nursing home use over a ten-year period while accounting for relevant covariates in U.S. adults aged 65 and older. We hypothesized that self-reported baseline history of psychiatric, emotional or nervous problems would be associated with greater risk of nursing home use, and that cognition trajectories with the greatest decline would be associated with subsequent higher risk of nursing home use.

METHODS

We used eight waves (1998-2016) of Health and Retirement Study data for adults aged 65 years and older. Latent class mixture modeling identified four distinct cognitive function trajectory classes (1998-2006): low-declining, medium-declining, medium-stable, high-declining. Participants from the 1998 wave (N = 5628) were classified into these four classes. Competing risks regression analysis modeled the sub-hazard of nursing home use between 2006 and 2016 as a function of baseline psychiatric history and cognitive function trajectories.

RESULTS

Psychiatric history was independently associated with greater risk of nursing home use (SHR 1.26, 95% CI 1.06-1.51, p<.01), net the effects of life course variables. Further, "low declining" (SHR 2.255, 95% CI 1.70-2.99, p<.001) and "medium declining" (2.103, 95% CI 1.69-2.61, p<.001) trajectories predicted increased risk of nursing home use.

DISCUSSION

Evidence of these associations can be used to educate policymakers and providers about the need for appropriate psychiatric training for staff in community-based and residential long-term care programs.

Understanding and predicting the longitudinal course of dementia

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

To date, most research in dementia has focused either on the identification of dementia risk prediction or on understanding changes and predictors experienced by individuals before diagnosis. Despite little is known about how individuals change after dementia diagnosis, there is agreement that changes occur over different time scales and are multidomain. In this study, we present an overview of the literature regarding the longitudinal course of dementia.

RECENT FINDINGS

Our review suggests the evidence is scarce and findings reported are often inconsistent. We identified large heterogeneity in dementia trajectories, risk factors considered and modelling approaches employed. The heterogeneity of dementia trajectories also varies across outcomes and domains investigated.

SUMMARY

It became clear that dementia progresses very differently, both between and within individuals. This implies an average trajectory is not informative to individual persons and this needs to be taken into account when communicating prognosis in clinical care. As persons with dementia change in many more ways during their patient journey, heterogeneous disease progressions are the result of disease and patient characteristics. Prognostic models would benefit from including variables across a number of domains. International coordination of replication and standardization of the research approach is recommended.