One-year mortality among elderly people after hospitalization due to fall-related fractures: comparison with a control group of matched elderly Mortalidade em um ano de idosos após hospitalização por fratura decorrente de queda: comparação com idosos pareados da população

Abstract Fall-related fractures among the elderly repre-sent an important public health problem. Severe fractures have been related to increased risk of death. In order to investigate the mortality pro-file of elderly individuals with severe fractures, 250 patients aged 60 years and over, hospitalized due to fall-related fractures and 250 elderly with-out fractures living in the local community were followed-up for one year. They were matched ac-cording to sex, age, time of hospitalization and neighborhood. Deaths were identified using prob-abilistic linkage of the research dataset and the local mortality registry. The one-year cumulative mortality was 25.2% in the case of individuals with severe fractures and 4% for those individu-als without. The mortality distribution was not homogeneous across the follow-up period. Two-thirds of deaths among the elderly individuals hospitalized due to fracture occurred within the first 3 months, whereas mortality among those individuals without fractures took place later. Heart disease, pneumonia, GI bleeding, sepsis, and pulmonary embolism, diabetes and stroke were important causes of one-year mortality.Bone Fractures; Accidental Falls; Aged; Survival Analysis; Mortality