Background
: It is a recent trend that average life span prolonged according to the socioeconomic and scientific advance, therfore elderly patients are steadily increasing. The interest toward geriatrics raise earlier. Never the less, present epidemiologic study to geriatric patients is rare, in our country. This study purpoted to make basic epidemiologic data of geriatric in-patients.

Methods : The subjects were 65 years old patients and over that visited to small and medium hospital of Andong city from June 1991 to March 1992. Among them new in-patients of 65 years old and over hospitalized at March, June, October, December were selected and their charts were reviewed.

Results : Male and female ratio of 216 geriatric inpatients was 1:1.3 and average age was 72.5 years. The average numbers of diagnosis were 2.6 and the most common disease was hypertension, others were COPD, fractures, gastritis, malignant tumors, degenerative arthritis as in order and the average duration of hospitalization was 9.1days in geriatric in-patients. The average numbers of class of prescribed drugs in geriatric inpatients were 5.6 and the significant difference was not noticed in sex and age. The most common prescribed drug was antibiotics, The average of total cholesterol was 162.9mg/dl and dangerous group was 7.3%, borderline group was 11.8% by NCP guideline. The ratios of smokers and alcoholics were 50.0%, 34.4% respectively.

Conclusion : This study was concerned about common diseases, prescribed drugs and health risk factors in geriatric in-patients. But this study was limited to small area and one community. Therefore, this result can't represent the result of the total geriatric population. As this reason, I wish to more & more great epidemiologic study about geriatric inpatients will being done in the future.