Age as an issue in the intensive care patient population

Critical Care facilities consume a disproportionately large amount of resources in health care. It has been suggested that Intensive Care be rationalised to utilise these resources more efficiently. One method of reducing demands is to apply critical admission criteria, a concept that may be difficult to enforce under the current morality of individual medical practice. Age restriction has been proposed as one of these criteria for admission. However, examination of research findings and current clinical practice suggests a more sophisticated approach is required when considering chronological age.

Other factors such as social and physiological function must be applied to age to quantify its validity as an admission criteria. Certainly it is clear that short term survival remains relatively unchanged in patients less than 75 years old. More epidemiological data on age in ICU will be forthcoming with the widespread use of the APACHE II classification sytem.