EVALUATION OF ELDERLY PATIENTS WITH DIAGNOSIS OF ACUTE SURGICAL ABDOMEN: A PROSPECTIVE, DESCRIPTIVE, NON-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

It has been observed that the population over 65 years of age increasingly requires surgical procedures and the clinical presentations of entities responsible for an acute abdomen are atypical. In emergency situations, diagnosis is more difficult than in adults due to various factors. Objectives: To evaluate older adult patients with a diagnosis of acute surgical abdomen at the “Dr. Manuel Núñez Tovar” of Maturin, Monagas state, January-September 2019 period. Methodology: A type of non-experimental, prospective, descriptive, cross-sectional, field research was conducted, where all patients over 60 years of age with a diagnosis of Acute surgical abdomen in the General Surgery service, with a sample of 53 patients who met the inclusion criteria. Results: 790 adult patients with a diagnosis of acute surgical abdomen in the indicated period were assessed, of which 53 patients corresponded to older adults. The main cause of acute surgical abdomen in older adults was intestinal obstruction with 26 patients (49.06%), 56 patients (56.60%) female with a general average age of 71.33 years. The main comorbidity was arterial hypertension (41.50%). 16.98% of the patients were complicated by sepsis (most frequent complication) with a mortality of 15.09% and more than half of the patients (54.71%) merited more than 4 days of hospitalization. Keywords: older adults, acute surgical abdomen, incidence, causes, complications.