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Updated: Oct 16, 2025

Author Spotlight: Assessing Surgical Frailty with Point-of-Care Ultrasound of Quadriceps Muscles
Published on: July 26, 2024
Frailty and cardiac surgery: to operate or not?
Daniel A Emmert1, Mark J Arcario, Bruno Maranhao
1Division of Cardiothoracic Anesthesia, Department of Anesthesiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
Purpose Of Review:
With an aging cardiac surgery population, prefrail and frail patients are becoming more common. Anesthesiologists will be faced with the decision of how best to provide care to frail patients. Identification, management, and outcomes in frail patients will be discussed in this review.
Recent Findings:
Frailty is associated with a variety of poor outcomes, such as increased hospital length of stay, medical resource utilization, readmission rates, and mortality. Prehabilitation may play a greater role in the management of frail cardiac surgery patients.
Summary:
As frailty will likely only increase amongst cardiac surgery patients, it is important to develop multicenter trials to study management and treatment options. Until those studies are performed, the care of frail cardiac surgery patients may be best provided by high-volume surgical centers with expertise in the management of frail patients.
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