JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

An aging population in combination with more gentle and less stressful surgical procedures leads to an increased number of operations on older patients. This collective raise novel challenges due to higher age heavily impacting treatment. A major problem, emerging in up to 50% of cases, is perioperative delirium. It is thus vital to understand, whether and which existing geriatric assessments are capable of reliably identifying risk factors, how high the incidence of delirium is and whether the resulting management of these risk factors might lead to a reduced incidence of delirium.

Objective:

Determing the frequency and severity of geriatric medical problems in (70+) elective patients of the Clinics of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Vascular Surgery, and Orthopedics, General Surgery and Trauma Surgery. Association with the incidence of perioperative delirium regarding potential risk factors. Recording the long-term effects of geriatric problems and any perioperative delirium that may have occurred on the further course of the patient's life.

Methods:

We performed both, pre- and postoperative assessments in patients of four different surgical departments with an age of more than 70. Patient validated screening instruments will be used to identify risk factors. Any medical problems detected will be treated according to current standards, and no intervention is planned as part of the study. In addition, a telephone follow-up will be performed 3, 6 and 12 months after discharge.

Results:

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Conclusions:

In the present study, we want to investigate whether the risk factors addressed in the assessment are associated with an increase in the delirium rate. The aim is then to reduce this comprehensive assessment to the central aspects to be able to conduct targeted and efficient risk screening. Clinical Trial: German Clinical Trials Registry at https://www.drks.de/DRKS00028614, Registered 25 March 2022