Age- and sex-specific predictors of inpatient rehabilitation facility discharge destination for adult patients with traumatic brain injury.
Tolu O Oyesanya, Gabrielle Harris, Michael P Cary and 3 others
PMID 34543111WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with TBI were discharged home less often than younger adults: 80% versus 89%.
No consistent patient or facility factors explained much of this pattern.
Key findings
01Younger adults were more likely to be discharged home than older adults: 89% versus 80%.
02Within both women and men, older age was associated with more discharge to subacute care: 20.20% of older women versus 9.99% of younger women, and 20.56% of older men versus 11.08% of younger men.
03The age- and sex-specific models explained little of the variation and did not identify a consistent set of predictors.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The dataset had no information on injury severity or acute hospital care before IRF admission, so the researchers used admission function as a stand-in. This was a records analysis, so it can show association but cannot prove that age, sex, insurance or other factors caused the discharge destination. Patients who died, stayed less than 3 days, were not living in the community before admission, or had missing key data were excluded, so the results apply only to survivors who stayed long enough and had usable records. Selection bias is possible because multiple factors determine which post-acute services a patient receives. The study did not adjust for multiple comparisons, so some significant findings may be chance. It could not account for clustering by specific rehabilitation facility. The subgroup models explained very little of the variation and did not find a consistent set of predictors.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article is listed as having NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read age or sex as causes of discharge destination. This was an observational analysis, and the models explained little of the variation, so factors not measured in the dataset may explain the pattern.