This review emphasizes the lack of evidence-based recommendations for nonagenarians and advocates for comprehensive geriatric assessment to guide care decisions.
Evidence gaps limit nonagenarian cardiovascular care; leaves open whether geriatric assessment improves outcomes pending dedicated trials.
The number of nonagenarian people in the world is steadily growing. This phenomenon will increase in future years: in 2050, world population prospects estimate 71.16 million people aged 90 years or older. The two main causes of death among people aged 85 years or more in Europe in 2003 were cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and cancers. However, the elderly are often excluded from clinical trials; they are underrepresented in clinical registries and especially nonagenarians. Care (medical, surgical, oncology) of these very elderly is currently insufficiently based on scientific recommendations. For the physician, the choice to treat or not to treat very elderly patients (for fear of side effects) is difficult. Oncology is particularly affected by this problem. Here we review these different fields of internal medicine management of nonagenarian patients with a special focus on oncology and on comprehensive geriatric assessment as a base for all care decision taking.
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Rivoirard et al. (2014) studied this question.
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