Elderly patients undergoing major surgery require careful preoperative screening and postoperative monitoring to prevent cardiac, respiratory, and infectious complications.
Supports routine perioperative vigilance for elderly surgical patients; leaves open optimal risk-stratification protocols for prospective validation.
As the population ages and as surgical and anesthetic techniques advance, more and more elderly patients are referred for surgery. As a result, the physician must be increasingly aware of the aged response to surgery and the management of the geriatric surgical patient in the perioperative period. Elderly patients are prone to cardiac, respiratory, and infectious complications, and thus, they need to be screened for the presence of pre-existing disease. In addition, the geriatric patient needs to be carefully monitored in the proper postoperative environment to guard against untoward sequelae.
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Chalfin et al. (1994) studied this question.
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