Major surgery ages your brain by FIVE MONTHS by the time you die and doubles your risk of ‘significant cognitive decline’, study finds
- Being admitted for non-surgical medical conditions had a much worse effect
- Scientists didn’t look at types of anaesthetic so couldn’t prove cause-and-effect
- Around 4.4million surgeries are performed in the UK every year
- Experts said they found in a survey that two thirds are afraid of brain damage
Having surgery could add five months to your brain age by the time you die, according to a study.
Research found that people who went under the knife also ended up with more than double the risk of ‘substantial’ brain decline.
The effect wasn’t as bad as those who were admitted to hospital for another medical problem, or for stroke victims, and researchers said the results were ‘reassuring’.
Around 4.4million surgeries are performed in England each year and two thirds of people reportedly worry their brains will be affected by an operation.
Types of anaesthetic were not studied so the researchers couldn’t prove the surgery caused the brain decline – they admitted needing an operation could just be a sign of otherwise poor health.
Researchers found that, while having surgery added five months onto someone’s brain age over the long term, being admitted for another serious, non-surgical condition added 1.4 years. There are around 4.4million surgical admissions by the NHS every year (stock image)
A study by the University of Wisconsin looked at data from 7,532 British people to work out how surgery could affect the brain’s ageing process.
The team looked specifically at cognitive decline, which is the natural loss of brain function which occurs as people get older and may start in middle age.
Some medical conditions such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease can rapidly speed up cognitive decline, but so, too, can hospital stays, scientists have found.
Having a ‘major’ surgical procedure which required an inpatient stay of two days or more added five months to the patient’s brain decline over the long term.
Being admitted to hospital for another, non-surgical, medical condition added 1.4 years. Having a stroke added a staggering 13 years.
The risk of ‘substantial cognitive decline’ rose to 5.5 per cent for surgical patients from 2.5 per cent for people who never had a major hospital admission.
A medical admission increased this risk to 12.7 per cent, the scientists said in the British Medical Journal.
‘Our data suggest that major surgery is associated with a small long term change in the age-related cognitive trajectory, with the odds of substantial decline doubling,’ the researchers, led by Professor Robert Sanders, wrote.
‘This information should be conveyed to patients and be weighed against the potential health and quality of life benefits of surgery during informed consent.’
The scientists said they had done a survey which found 65 per cent of members of the public were concerned they could lose brain power by having surgery.
And this may have even driven them to turn down operations which ‘might otherwise have health benefits’.
The more than 7,000 people involved in the surgery study were all civil servants working in the UK who were aged between 35 and 55.
They were followed for a maximum of 19 years and had, on average, four brain assessments during that time.
Because the researchers didn’t look into the types of anaesthetics used or other aspects of the surgeries, they could not conclude that the operations actually cause the brain decline, only that there was a link.
In an accompanying comment made by Professor Carol Brayne from the University of Cambridge, she wrote: ‘This study is reassuring in that the authors found no large declines in cognition after surgery.
‘Importantly, we need to know which risk factors are modifiable and which are not.
‘If some of [the] findings (particularly those linked to non-surgical admissions) are closely related to dying it might be challenging to disentangle the preventable from the inevitable.’