X-Message-Number: 14780 From: "Jan Coetzee" <> Subject: Surgery for Those Over 100 Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 20:20:20 -0400 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0152_01C03DF7.D50A1C80 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" US Study Endorses Surgery for Those Over 100 CHICAGO (Reuters) - Age should not be a barrier to surgery for people who live to be 100 or more, according to a study released on Monday. ``There have been excellent advancements in anesthetic administration, surgical techniques and postoperative care,'' said Ramesh Paladugu of New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, who studied 61 surgeries there involving general anesthesia among people over the age of 100 in recent years. More than half of the patients were discharged to a nursing home, 30% returned to their families and 15 percent died, he said. ``Elective surgery should not be deferred and emergency surgery should not be denied to patients older than 100 years because of their chronological age,'' Paladugu said in a report delivered to the annual clinical congress of the American College of Surgeons. ``A patient's physiological age is more important than his or her chronological age. Therefore, as long as one's overall health is good, a centenarian should be able to undergo surgical procedures without having any problems,'' he added. The issue is a significant one because people are living longer, the college said. In the 1930s the oldest patients having surgical procedures were over 70 while in the 1970s, 90 was typically the oldest age for surgery, it said. The first report of a surgical procedure being performed on someone over the age of 100 in the United States was in 1985, it added. While the US population will grow by 53% between 1990 and 2015, the number of individuals older than age 85 will increase fivefold and the number of centenarians will multiply by a factor of 32, the college said. In the study presented on Monday the average age of the patients was 101 and the oldest one was 111. ------=_NextPart_000_0152_01C03DF7.D50A1C80 Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14780