Older adults commonly have a decline in how they perform on neuropsychological tests after a total joint arthroplasty like a hip or knee surgery. A new study found that people who undergo the operations don’t have excess population-average memory decline at three or five years after surgery compared to those who don’t have the surgery.
Overall, the findings give a realistic alternative to avoiding surgery, according to authors of a study published Monday in the Journal of The American Geriatrics Society.
As part of the research, a team evaluated memory tests of people who had a joint surgery or an elective surgery compared to those who didn’t. All of the participants were 65 or older, and were matched to people who had the same issues but didn’t undergo surgery. The average age of participants was 74. Surgeries happened between 1998 and 2018.
There were 1,947 eligible joint surgery patients (1358 knee, 589 hip) who were matched to 1,947 older adults who reported arthritic pain and didn’t have surgery along with 1,947 older adults who said they didn’t have pain but also didn’t get surgery. The researchers compared those teams with a surgical control group consisting of 1,631 participants, most of whom underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy or inguinal herniorrhaphy. The authors found that memory decline at three and five years after surgery was similar to the controls.
The researchers didn’t find evidence that joint surgery was linked with a statistically significant difference in memory decline at one, three or five years after surgery compared with surgical and nonsurgical controls. There wasn’t an excess increase in dementia probability at three years after surgery, either.
Though more than 30% of older hip/knee surgery patients meet the criteria for neurocognitive disorder one year after surgery, by three years after the operation there is no evidence for cognitive decline greater than typical population rates, the authors wrote.
The news comes after another report out last week found elective surgeries aren’t associated with a higher rate of dementia among older adults. Those who underwent surgery had a 12% lower rate of dementia compared to people they were matched with who didn’t have an operation. The association remained the same in adjusted data.
