80-year-olds fit for heart surgery

Doctors should not shy away from giving 80-year-olds heart bypass surgery, new research has suggested.

Researchers from the UK and Canada found that most of those octogenarians who received treatment were still alive five years later and had half the risk of death of their peers in the general population.

The study, published in Heart Journal, was based on 12,461 patients, 706 of whom were over the age of 80 at the time of surgery. All of them were operated on between 1996 and 2003 in one specialist unit in England.

During the study period, the proportion of surgical patients who were in their ‘80s more than doubled, from just over 4% to nearly 10%.

However, the researchers found that they were more likely to undergo emergency surgery than younger patients.

The authors of the report suggested that there was a tendency to treat them conservatively until the crisis arose rather than offer them surgery earlier.

The researchers said that the degree of urgency and the length of the procedure predicted whether a patient was likely to live or die, over and above the traditional protocols used to assess the likely risk of death.

However, the authors concluded that although the risk of dying was higher in the elderly group and they spent longer in intensive care than their younger counterparts, their chances of survival were 50% better after the first year of surgery than those of their peers in the general population.

(KMcA/SP)