Hospitalized Older Adults Less Often Tested for Flu

A U.S. study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggests older adults may be less likely to get tested for flu in the hospital, reports Reuters . Analysis of data on 1,422 adults hospitalized with a respiratory illness or a high fever at four Tennessee hospitals during the flu seasons from 2006 to 2012 found only 399 people had flu tests ordered by their doctors. Seventy-seven of these subjects actually had the virus. Tests ordered by the researchers detected flu in another 59 subjects, or nearly 6 percent of the cohort that did not have flu tests ordered by their doctors. Persons whose physicians ordered flu tests tended to skew younger, around 58 years old on average, compared to 66 years old for people who did not get tests. The implication is that many of the older adults with flu would have gone undiagnosed and untreated, says Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Dr. H. Keipp Talbot. "If influenza is not considered as a potential cause of the illness, it is unlikely that the patient will be treated for influenza," he notes. Talbot says sometimes older adults are not tested for flu because they exhibit a high fever, although the older adults in the study did have fever or other symptoms of respiratory illness that would make them good testing candidates.