There is currently limited evidence regarding prolonged postoperative cognitive decline in elderly surgical patients, highlighting a significant gap in research that requires larger, multicenter studies with longer follow-up.
This review can only provide limited evidence of prolonged POCD (more than a year) and further research that involves better study designs, larger samples, involving longer follow-up, and at different sites (multicentre) is highly advised. This in turn may help researchers and clinicians to discover the actual causes and risk factors and develop appropriate preventive and treatment protocols to tackle POCD in the ageing surgical population.
Arefayne et al. (Wed,) studied this question.