Are the oldest old treated more actively in hospital than previously and do they benefit from it?

Dr. Oksuzyan is Post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark.

Dr. Jeune is Associate Professor of Epidemiology, University of Southern Denmark and Director of the Graduate School of Public Health.

Prof. Christensen is the Director of the Danish Twin Registry and the Danish Aging Research Center University of Southern Denmark and Senior Research Scientist at the Terry Sanford Institute, Duke University, USA.

Are older people admitted to hospitals and receiving surgical treatments more often than people of the same age did a decade ago? To answer this question, our research group compared the percentage of hospitalized people and individuals treated surgically from ages 85 to 99 years who were born in Denmark in 1895 and 1905. Those born in 1895 were followed from 1980 to 1994, whilst individuals born in 1905 were followed from 1990 to 2004. The study was based on Danish register data which is a unique data source for scientific research as it covers the entire Danish population.