Past Falls Can Lead to Post-Surgery Complications

If you are in advanced age and experiencing some sort of post-surgery complications, the reason could be in the falls that you suffered in the past. Testing around 235 patients with average age of 74 years, the scientists found that 33% of such people suffered a fall within six months preceding their surgical treatment for cardiovascular and other problems. It was found that people that suffered a fall in such manner were more vulnerable to post surgical complicacies. The respective proportion of patients with history of fall and without fall was 59% to 26% in case of colorectal surgery patients. The same was 39% and 15% in case of those undergoing heart surgery. "Given the high volume of surgical care provided for the elderly population, improving preoperative risk assessment for the older adult is becoming increasingly important," says author Dr. Teresa Jones, of Colorado University. Since a majority of surgical operations are carried out on persons over 65 years in age, the finding has quite a lot of significance for medical science.