Read more about the project here.
Frailty is a condition that describes the build-up of problems across multiple body systems, and is common as people age. Having frailty before surgery increases the risk of a bad outcome, and older patients have surgery more often than any other age group. Unfortunately, clinicians don’t know what the best tool to diagnose frailty before surgery is.
To improve how older people recover after surgery, clinicians need to be able to identify people living with frailty. However, we don’t know what tool is best at identifying people who are likely to have a complication after surgery.
The goal of the project was to identify differences between two leading frailty tools in their accuracy and ease of use for patients and clinicians. These new discoveries will be provided to clinicians to help them choose which frailty tool to use before surgery to identify older patients at a high-risk of bad outcomes after surgery.
Daniel McIsaac, MD, MPH, FRCPC is an Associate Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, and Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa, an Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and an Anesthesiologist at The Ottawa Hospital. He is also on the board of directors for the Society for Geriatric Anesthesia. He obtained his MD from Dalhousie University, and a Master of Public Health from Harvard University. Dr. McIsaac’s academic and clinical interests include the perioperative care of older people with frailty and optimization of the health care system to enhance post-operative outcomes.