ST. LOUIS, Nov 23, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- Many older people say they have
memory problems after surgery but U.S. researchers said they found no
post-surgical issues in older patients.
First author Dr. Michael Avidan and Dr. Alex Evers of Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis said their study findings, published in
Anesthesiology, did not support the widespread belief patients with early
Alzheimer's disease may worsen as a consequence of surgery.
"There's a perception that people go in for surgery, and they aren't quite the
same afterward," Avidan said in a statement.
Avidan and Evers said they did not feel it was reasonable to compare people
having surgery to those who were healthy so they studied 575 patients who were
tested annually for Alzheimer's-type dementia, and then divided the 361 people
who had mild to moderate dementia and the 214 who were dementia-free into three
groups -- those who had surgery, those with illness and a third group with
neither.
"We were able to use patients as their own controls before and after surgery and
to compare groups of patients over time and we did not detect any evidence of a
long-term cognitive decline," Evers said. "Our findings suggest that if older
people physically recover from surgery, they should expect that within six
months or a year, they will return to their previous level of cognitive ability,
too."
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