Spending the night in an emergency room puts older adults at higher risk of dying in the hospital: study

Emergency rooms around the world are overloaded and understaffed, and patients are paying the price. Specifically, the cost is death for those over the age of 75 if they’re unlucky enough to have to spend the full night in the ER before they’re admitted to the hospital.

“Researchers in France assessed statistics from 97 different emergency departments … [and] compared patients in two different groups: those who were admitted to a regular hospital room before midnight, and those who had to spend a full night in the ER before they were given a room,” Fox News reported.

What the researchers found was that those who stayed the whole night in the ER not only were more likely to die in the hospital within 30 days, but “were also more likely to have adverse health outcomes, including falls, infection, bleeding, myocardial infarction, stroke, thrombosis (blood clots), bedsores and dysnatremia (low sodium levels).”