The Burden of Community-Acquired Pneumonia in the Elderly: The Spanish EVAN-65 Study

From BMC Public Health In this study, incidence of CAP increased dramatically with ageing, achieving the highest rate in people aged 85 years or more, where 29 cases per 1,000 person-year were observed. According to sex and age strata, very elderly men are at the greatest risk considering that one episode of CAP can be expected every year for every 25 men aged 85 years or older. Similar trends in the incidence rates stratified by age have been reported in most prior epidemiological studies, considering that the frequent association between increasing age and presence of underlying diseases accounts for an increased morbid-mortality due to CAP in the oldest adults.[17,18,21] It must also be noted that in this study the 30-days case-fatality rate was three fold higher among patients 85 years or older than in patients 65-74 years, which supports the important specific role of age as a predictor of 30-days mortality among patients with CAP, as the pneumonia severity score reflects.[29]