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. 2023 Dec;3(4):100166.
doi: 10.1016/j.ahr.2023.100166. Epub 2023 Oct 12.

Advance care planning and outpatient visits among older adults across cognitive levels

Zahra Rahemi  1 , Juanita-Dawne R Bacsu  2 , Justine S Sefcik  3 , Maryam S Sadafipoor  4 , George Demiris  5 , Swann Arp Adams  6
Affiliations

Advance care planning and outpatient visits among older adults across cognitive levels

Zahra Rahemi et al. Aging Health Res. 2023 Dec.

Abstract

Advance care planning (ACP) can help reduce end-of-life care challenges for persons with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia and their care partners. Building on our previous work, we examined the impact of ACP on outpatient/doctor visits in older adults with dementia/impaired cognition and normal cognition. Using datasets from the 2014 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we conducted a cross-sectional study of 17,698 participants aged 51 years and older. Our analyses included survey descriptive and logistic regression procedures. Our findings indicated that having at least one ACP measure was significantly associated with a higher mean number of outpatient visits in both cognition groups. Based on our findings, we recommend considering healthcare access and use as an intervening variable in future ACP research.

Keywords: Advance care planning; Cognitive impairment; Health and retirement Study; Healthcare use; Outpatient visits.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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