Chest
Clinical InvestigationsCost, Outcome, and Functional Status in Octogenarians and Septuagenarians after Cardiac Surgery
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
This study was approved by the institutional review board of a university-affiliated, tertiary care medical center. The hospital's computerized medical information system was queried for all patients 70 to 89 years of age who had undergone cardiac surgery between January 1, 1998, and December 31, 1999. All patients who were 80 to 89 years old (cases) and an equal number of randomly selected patients who were 70 to 79 years old (control subjects) from the same time period had their charts
Results
One hundred three patients in each group underwent cardiac surgery and were studied (Table 1). Octogenarians were more likely to be widowed (p ≤ 0.001), while septuagenarians were more likely to be married (p < 0.01). Octogenarians were more likely to have had preoperative strokes (p = 0.05) but were less likely to have diabetes mellitus (p < 0.001). Other comorbidities were distributed similarly. Octogenarians were less likely to have undergone mitral valve surgery (p = 0.01) but were more
Discussion
Despite a higher prevalence of preoperative stroke, which is a risk factor for hospital mortality after cardiac surgery, we found that octogenarians underwent cardiac surgery with hospital survival rates and complication rates that were similar to those of septuagenarians but at a higher hospital cost. Our hospital mortality rate (8.2% in octogenarians) is similar to or lower (5.6 to 24.3%) than those found in other studies evaluating CABG.68 Using Medicare data, Peterson et al9 found a
Conclusion
We found that cardiac surgery can be performed in the elderly with good hospital and late functional results, but at higher hospital costs than those for younger patients.
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