Table 2

Incidence of unplanned hospitalisation during the last year of life, by illness trajectory

	No. decedents	Unplanned hospitalisation		Number of person-years*	Incidence rate per 100 person-years	Incidence rate ratio (95% CIs)†
	No. decedents	No. events	Mean	Number of person-years*	Incidence rate per 100 person-years	Unadjusted	Adjusted‡
Overall	77 315	128 156	1.66	73 326	175	1.0 (Ref)§	1.0 (Ref)
Trajectories
Cancer	23 213	49 459	2.13	21 447	231	1.22 (1.21 to 1.24)	1.20 (1.18 to 1.21)
Organ failure	28 338	52 184	1.84	26 824	195	1.09 (1.08 to 1.11)	1.04 (1.03 to 1.06)
Prolonged dwindling	20 064	19 326	0.96	19 552	99	0.57 (0.56 to 0.59)	0.66 (0.65 to 0.68)
Sudden death	5700	7187	1.26	5503	131	0.73 (0.71 to 0.76)	0.79 (0.77 to 0.82)

*The number of person-years at risk is not equal to the number of decedents because time at risk was defined as the number of days when the persons were not already hospitalised (ie, when the decedents were truly at risk of unplanned hospitalisation).
†Robust SEs were used to estimate the 95% CIs; incidence rate ratio obtained from zero-inflated Poisson models.
‡Adjusted for sex, age, education, marital status, frailty, number of chronic diseases, polypharmacy; decedents with missing data about education (2.1% of total) were excluded from this analysis.
§The total study population was used as the reference category to compare the risks across illness trajectories to the average risk in the cohort.