It's known that after a procedure such as heart surgery, recent diagnosis of cardiac disease, recovering from cardiac arrest or coronary artery bypass graft, can have post-procedure depression and anxiety. However, something that is not as known is that in some cases patients have shown to have decreased cognitive ability following a procedure, in particular heart valve surgery has been studied.
Heart valve surgery is an operation to replace one or more valve--the bicuspid/mitral valve, tricuspid valve, pulmonary valve and aortic valve--inside the heart that is not functioning properly. The valves are either repaired or fully replaced either with a biological or mechanical replacement, either through open heart surgery or minimally invasive heart surgery. Similar to other surgeries of the heart, the patient is in intensive care unit (ICU) for a day or more for recovery before spending several days in a normal hospital room. In 20014, about 156,000 heart valve surgeries occurred with the most common condition leading to the procedure being aortic stenosis
In a study, it was found that individuals who underwent heart valve surgery had a decreased cognitive decline over six months post-operation.There has been studies conducted on other reasons for heart surgery such as coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). The above linked study focused on heart valve surgery found that six months after the surgery patients had a general decline in cognitive ability. The exact cause of what links these two things together is not certain, but there has been studies to confirm there is a link.
Purple,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting post. I too am curious as to what are the causes that link heart surgery and a decline in cognitive ability. Perhaps the cognitive decline that occurs after heart surgery is due to some societal notion that after heart surgery we expect life to never be the same????