Frailty and Post-operative Complications in Older Surgical Patients: The Implication of Frailty and Preoperative Risk Assessment

The goal of this study is to analyze the effect of frailty status on postoperative outcomes. These include postoperative complications (only ICD-10 coded diagnoses), length of hospitalization (ward/ICU), disposition, and survival. The project will also attempt to find synergism between a positive frailty status and common medical conditions (e.g. diabetes, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, dementia, and kidney disease), as well as anesthesiological and surgical processes (e.g. duration and type of anesthesia, surgical risk, and surgical discipline). Different assessment tools will be analyzed regarding their predictive power and clinical practicability. This should help improve preoperative risk assessment and allow for the multidimensional (physical, cognitive, social) identification of relevant frailty characteristics in the perioperative setting. All outcome parameters, including admission and discharge periods, will be collected using coded information from our hospital database. There will be no follow-up measurements after hospital discharge.

Inclusion criteria

• Male and female patients with age 70 years and above scheduled for surgery in the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (CCM, CVK), Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin