Does preoperative frailty increase the risk of postoperative mortality across different levels of operative stress in surgical patients?
Frailty screening should be applied universally before surgery, as even low- and moderate-stress procedures carry high mortality risk in frail patients.
We developed a novel operative stress score to quantify physiologic stress for surgical procedures. Patients who were frail and very frail had high rates of postoperative mortality across all levels of the Operative Stress Score. These findings suggest that frailty screening should be applied universally because low- and moderate-stress procedures may be high risk among patients who are frail.
Shinall et al. (Wed,) studied this question.