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Objectives: to determine the incidence and the dynamics of asymptomatic bacteriuria in ambulatory' nursing home residents, and to characterise bacteria according to their phenotype and genotype. Design: an 18 months prospective longitudinal study. Subjects: 42 nursing home residents (31 female, 11 males) without indwelling catheters. Methods: urine was sampled every 3 months. Antibiograms, biotyping and ribotyping were performed. Results: the cumulative percent of infection for females and males was 75% and 27% respectively. Osteoporosis was associated with bacteriuria. Ribotypes of consecutive Escherichia coli isolates indicated that each patient harboured a different strain. Conclusions: asymptomatic bacteriuria in the elderly is a dynamic and transient phenomenon. Osteoporosis is common among this population. Ribotyping is a powerful tool in the elucidation of the epidemiology of this bacteriuria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Hip fractures are highly frequent and severe problem, increasing incidence and severity with aging and high disability and mortality rates. Hence, the ability to predict this condition can be of high value for preventive healthcare. The present work explores clinical biomarkers' application for hip fracture risk evaluation and prediction, using an information-theoretical methodology. Material and Method: A dataset on geriatric patients, with and without hip fracture, was analyzed, including blood biomarkers routinely available to physicians: albumin, urea, hemoglobin, calcium, and white blood cells. This research comprised geriatric patients hospitalized at the Shmuel Harofe Geriatric Medical Center, Israel. The patients' data, collected during 2012-2017, were accessed retrospectively. Normalized mutual information was utilized to establish correlations between the parameters, and the nearest neighbor rule with the weighted Hamming distance was used for the construction of a diagnostic decision rule for hip fracture risk evaluation. Results: We developed an algorithm (decision tree) for hip fracture risk group attribution for subjects under 80 years old. The algorithm provided the sensitivity of 0.581 with the 95% confidence interval (0.505, 0.653), and specificity of 0.540 with the 95% confidence interval (0.479, 0.604). This performance was comparable with the results of other common methods for hip fracture risk evaluation, yet the present method may be preferable in terms of data accessibility and the ability to determine the possible time of the fracture. Conclusion: The use of this method has been piloted in the clinic, and with further development and application, can help evaluate the risks of hip fracture in older subjects (aged 60 years or over) to optimize preventive interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rate of Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage among adults was compared with that among children (age, ≤6 years) in the same population. Nasopharyngeal culture results for 1300 adults and 404 children were analyzed. S. pneumoniae was carried by only 4% of the adults, compared with 53% of children in the same community. Young age, day care center attendance, having young siblings, and no antibiotic use during the month before screening were associated with the high carriage rate among children, whereas the only risk factor associated with carriage among adults was the presence of a respiratory infection on the screening day. S. pneumoniae serotype distribution and antibiotic resistance patterns differed between adults and children. Isolates of the same serotype—even of the same clone—differed in their antibiotic susceptibility patterns between children and adults. In a subanalysis of 151 pairs of children and their parents and of 32 pairs of siblings, intrafamilial transmission of S. pneumoniae could not be demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]