Nurses and doctors may be able to quickly and easily identify delirium in hospitalized older adults simply by asking the patients two questions, according to new research published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. If patients fail to answer correctly what day of the week it is or can't correctly recite the months of the year backwards, it indicates delirium in 93 percent of the cases, the study announcement noted. Of the 201 participants tested in this study, 42 were clinically diagnosed with delirium. The two-item test identified 48 as possibly delirious--42 were identified correctly, with 6 false positives. Study abstract