Characterization of 60 Year-Old and Older Patients Entering Emergency Rooms due to Drug and Alcohol Abuse. Argentina, December 2003 and October 2005

Abstract

Demographic studies and projections made for the coming years inform about a significant increase ranging from 214 million of elderly people in 1950 to over 1 billion in 2005 i.e. the proportion increased from 8.5% to 13.7 % which would mean that by 2025 one out of every 7 people will be in the Senior category. Seniors are a population with little participation in economic activity and with a substantial increase of leisure time. Moreover, they are likely to suffer different social situations such as abandonment, loneliness, family misunderstanding, lack of social integration, etc. This may lead to an increased consumption of alcohol and licit or illicit drugs, making it an issue that will take new levels of complexity in this new era and must be addressed quickly and conscientiously in the future. In this paper we present a characterization of elderly people admitted to an emergency room, establishing the correlation between violence and alcohol or drug consumption.