Cognitive Intervention and Rehabilitation Outcomes in Hip Fracture Patients

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Hip fracture often occurs in frail older people and is a major concern for the health care systems because it is associated with an up to 36% excess mortality within 1 year. Hip fracture also represents a risk factor for further falls and fractures, functional decline and institutionalization, with ...

Hip fracture often occurs in frail older people and is a major concern for the health care systems because it is associated with an up to 36% excess mortality within 1 year. Hip fracture also represents a risk factor for further falls and fractures, functional decline and institutionalization, with <40% of hip fractured patients regaining their pre-injury level of ambulation. One of the most challenging tasks of today's post-acute geriatric rehabilitation wards is improving the functional abilities of fragile hip-fractured patients and discharging most of them to their homes. Yet, the rising incidence of hip fractures in the elderly has created an overwhelming workload on those departments and has significantly increased the burden on healthcare resources. Previous studies have found that cognitive decline is an important negative predictor in rehabilitation. Several studies have shown that cognitive interventions can improve functional abilities of older people. Yet, these studies were conducted in community dwelling older people. Our study will assess this issue amongst post-acute rehabilitation hip fracture patients. Our hypotyhesis is that those patients recieving specific cognitive intervention will show significantly better rehabilitation outcomes and cognitive function. The objective of the present study is to assess whether specific cognitive intervention will influence rehabilitation outcomes of post-acute hip fracture patients. This is a randomized double blinded study. We will compare two groups: one will recieve specific cognitive intervention and a control group will recieve conventional occupational therapy treatment. Both groups will recieve the same amount of interventions.The interventions will include all together 12 sessions, each being 45 minutes, for a total of 3 weeks. The intervention will include: 4 treatments in the area of memory and attention, 4 treatments in the area of problem solving, 4 treatments in the area of planning and analysing. Patients in the control group will recieve conventional occupational therapy treatment: 3 weeks of all together 12 sessions, 45 minutes each. The outcome measures are: a disability measure, the Functional Independence Measure (FIM), the motor FIM, the Montebello Rehabilitation Factor Score (MRFS), also called motor FIM effectiveness. In addition 4 cognitive functional measures: the Color Trail Test, the Kettle Test, the Groningen Activity Restriction Skill (GARS), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA). The randomization process will be carried out by withdrawing a piece of paper written either A (intervention) (n=10) or B (control) (n=10) from an envelope. The subjects will not be informed as to which group they will be assigned. Patient recruitment and the randomization process will be supervised by the clinical staff. The assessors will be blinded to the type of intervention. Statistical analysis will be performed using the IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows (Version 25.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.). The study sample size was estimated using the mean and the standard deviation of the motor FIM measure (calculated for this population), with improvement assumption by 7 points, with power of 0.8 and significance level of 0.05.

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