Over chardonnay and port Sunday, two friends who are anesthesia experts told me of an interesting observation: Health care professionals are anecdotally reporting that there is a very high rate of dementia in elderly patients following surgery. We are already aware that open-heart surgery patients often have memory lapses and “chemo brain” is a known though not inevitable consequence of chemotherapy.
But this is a newly reported phenomenon and despite being whispered about in hospitals, there are no clinical trials to map out its legitimacy and severity. In fact, my friends say there’s little incentive to fund research in this area since the patients are typically very old and do not have long lives ahead of them.
But as our population becomes hoarier, post-surgery dementia, if confirmed, could become a roadblock to good quality of life in later years. Elderly individuals now are participating in activities undreamed of a generation or two ago. Long distance running, working, gee, even dating, are activities not uncommon even among people in their 80’s. Will they be as eager to go under the knife if they believe that medical procedures designed to help them may in fact hobble their ability to reason, socialize and live independently?
As health care communicators, how will we allay their fears and help them weigh the risks of surgery with possible consequences?
Michael
ReplyDeleteWithout wanting to be too negative, the increase in antibiotic resistance and the global shortage of new agents in development pipelines will mean that a great deal of surgery in older patients may need to be curtailed. Procedures which are relatively commonplace now (joint replacement, open heart surgery, etc.) are dependent on large quantities of post-op antibiotics. If there are no effective ones available, then such interventions will become overly risky.
So post-surgical dementia may become less of a problem, but not for reasons we should be happy about