MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Kwang-il Kim, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine,
Seoul National University College of Medicine,
Seoul National University Bundang Hospital,
Seoul, Republic of Korea
MedicalResearch: What are the main findings of the study?
Answer: There are few tools of preoperative risk stratification for the older adults. We found that not only disease itself but also
frailty can lead to post-operative complication and mortality. So we made a scoring model to predict post-operative mortality and morbidity based on comprehensive geriatric assessment and it worked exactly.
MedicalResearch: Were any of the findings unexpected?
Answer: Under our predictive model, there was inflection point of mortality slope at point 5.
Post-operative mortality of someone who scores 4~5 is below 10%, but it of other who scores 6~7 is about 30%. It was unexpected drastic change, so we think that there is physiologic threshold point.
MedicalResearch: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?
Answer: Because the elderly are different from adults, clinicians have to focus on functional capacity, co-morbidity, and frailty for their older surgical patients. Make operative decision base on comprehensive
geriatric assessment or our scoring model. If you depend on your own feeling, some older patients will suffer from post-operative complication and someone will forfeit his chance of surgery.
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