As We Age, How Safe Is Surgery?

“In modern surgery, it’s a rare event to die from surgery,” says Dr. Emily Finlayson, director of the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Surgery in Older Adults. “The risk comes from being able to recover.” ......Fragility, cognition, mobility, depression, how much support how someone has at home — those are all also factors to be considered. These are mostly non-traditional factors, and in particular, “fragility is an emerging concept that goes beyond chronological age. You can be eighty and really fit, or you can be fifty-five and have a lot of physical function issues and maybe cognitive issues,” Finlayson says. Fragility is more about resilience in mind and body, she adds."