News & Events: Surgery in Older Adults

We are pleased to announce that Emily Finlayson, M.D., M.S., FACS, professor of Surgery, Medicine (Geriatrics), and Health Policy at the University of California San Francisco has been named the new Vice Chair for Faculty Affairs and Development in the Department of Surgery. Dr. Finlayson received her MD at Harvard Medical School and MS from the Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School. She completed her general surgery residency at UCSF and her fellowship in colorectal surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Her NIH-funded work includes population-based analyses, clinical [...]

Carolyn D. Seib, M.D., MAS, a clinical investigator and member of the UCSF endocrine surgery faculty, has been awarded a RAP (Resource Allocation Program) seed grant by the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center to study postoperative cognitive dysfunction in elderly patients undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer. Dr. Seib's project is part of her ongoing research focused on individualizing the surgical care of older adults. With increasing evidence supporting the surveillance of small, low-risk papillary thyroid cancers, the decision of whether to manage thyroid cancer operatively [...]

A new research study shows that patient frailty should be assessed in preoperative planning for surgery in older adults, even for common ambulatory general surgery operations. The study, led by principal investigator and lead author, Carolyn D. Seib, M.D., MAS, a general and endocrine surgeon at UCSF, was reported on in the journal JAMA Surgery and highlighted by the NY Times in a subsequent article. Importantly, the study found that frailty is more closely associated with the risk of complications than  chronological age. It has implications for both treatment planning and informed consent [...]

UCSF News reports that U.S. only a small number of nursing home residents are alive and ambulatory one year after undergoing lower extremity revascularization procedures with those still alive gaining little, if any, function: Only a few U.S. nursing home residents who undergo lower extremity revascularization procedures are alive and ambulatory a year after surgery, according to UCSF researchers, and most patients still alive gained little, if any, function. The study appears in the April 6 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "Our findings can inform conversations among physicians, [...]

The UCSF Center for Surgery in Older Adults (CSOA) has published its inaugural Winter 2015 Newsletter: Greetings from the UCSF Surgery Wellness Program. As 2015 draws to a close, we would like to thank our patients, families, and supporters for all they have contributed to this exciting new initiative. We are delighted that our program continues to grow and flourish. With the help of a dedicated care team in the clinic, we are innovating approaches to individualized care for older patients undergoing surgery. Alicia Rivas, Laurie Kramer, and Kaitlyn Attiga are refining tailored approaches [...]

Alexander Smith, M.D., MPH  discusses trends and news ideas about surgical outcomes percolating among thought leaders in the field including Emily Finlayson, M.D., M.S., Associate Professor of Surgery and Health Policy at UCSF, in a post at GeriPal, a geriatrics and palliative care blog. A while back people realized that outcomes of surgery in older people were probably better than previously believed. This led to a widespread perception that we were being ageist by not being aggressive enough in offering surgery to older adults.  We started operating on more older adults. We identified [...]

UCSF News reports on a study that urges doctors to consider patient risks, benefits and preferences when treating low-risk skin cancers with surgery in elderly patients: Surgery is often recommended for skin cancers, but older, sicker patients can endure complications as a result and may not live long enough to benefit from the treatment. A new study led by UC San Francisco focused on the vexing problem of how best to handle non-melanoma skin cancers – which are very common -- among frail, elderly patients. In the study sample, the researchers found that most non-melanoma skin cancers [...]

UCSF News reports on a new tool to assess health risks for older adults designed for physicians to assess their geriatric patients in a medical setting: Calculating medical risk can be an inexact science, especially for older adults, with many factors from the environment to chronic diseases helping determine how long a person lives. Now, a UC San Francisco team has developed a tool that can help determine – and perhaps influence – senior citizens' 10-year survivability rates. This tool is designed for physicians to assess their geriatric patients in a medical setting. It is not meant for [...]

The New York Times reports in its "The New Old Age - Caring and Coping Blog" on the high-risk of performing surgery in older adults, even for otherwised routine operations. Even operations considered fairly routine in younger patients, like appendectomies, become high-risk for nursing home residents. "Something about undergoing anesthesia, the surgery's physiological assault on the body, impacts older people much more than we think," said Dr. Emily Finlayson, an Associate Professor of Surgery at University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of a recent study published in The [...]