Nursing Home Residents Face Severe Functional Limitation or Death After Hospitalization for Pneumonia.

This was an observational cohort, not a trial, so it cannot show that hospitalization or any single factor caused severe disability or death. The cohort included only residents hospitalized for pneumonia with a primary pneumonia diagnosis or septicemia with secondary pneumonia; residents treated in the nursing home for pneumonia were not reliably included. 41,505 residents were excluded because they lacked an MDS assessment within 60 days after discharge and did not die during that period, so the results may not represent all hospitalized residents. The data are administrative Medicare and MDS records, so diagnoses and coding may be inaccurate; missing exposure data were assumed absent when percentages were calculated. Few if any residents were hospitalized for viral pneumonia such as COVID-19, SARS, or MERS, so the paper's comparison to COVID prognosis is not a direct study of COVID pneumonia. The sample was restricted to fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries age 66 years or older in U.S. nursing homes, excluding Puerto Rico, so it may not apply to younger residents or other insurance settings.

The supplied text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration. The paper is listed as supported by NIH extramural research.

Do not read the 89.9% composite rate as proof that hospitalization causes severe disability or death. This was an observational cohort of nursing home residents hospitalized for pneumonia, with no untreated comparison, and many residents were already frail.