Does time spent in hospital in the final 15 years of life increase with age at death? A population based study

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Abstract
The use of health services rises substantially with increasing age.1 Although this is commonly assumed to be a consequence of longevity, the chief determinants of lifetime use of health services, irrespective of age at death, may be the antecedents of death,2 and increased use by elderly people may result from their being closer to death than young people. We studied time in hospital in the final 15 years of life (as a proxy for major morbidity) and related this to age at death. Cumulative number of days spent in hospital by men in the final 15 years of life, by age at death and number of years before death, for the values within each age group at the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 95th centiles of “heaviness” of hospital use. These data are cross sectional—that is, based on the values taken by the total population in the year before death, 2 years before death, 3 years before death, etc We used data from the Oxford …