Risk of Post-Operative Complications, Higher in Obese Patients

Filed in archive Cases , Studies on March 16, 2007

Morbidly obese patients had a death rate nearly twice as high as that of all other patients, had higher rate of cardiac arrest and have significantly higher risk of complications following surgery, including heart attack, wound infection, nerve injury and urinary tract infection.

Such were the findings of a new study of a research team at the University of Michigan Health System.

...higher rates of the following complications in obese patients: heart attack, with obese patients experiencing five times the rate of attack than non-obese patients (0.5 percent versus 0.1 percent); wound infection, with a 1.7-times higher rate (6 percent versus 3.5 percent); peripheral nerve injury, with a four-times higher rate (0.4 percent versus 0.1 percent); and urinary tract infection, with a 1.5-times higher rate (3.9 percent versus 2.6 percent).

The said study is a retrospective review of adult post-operative complications from a U-M Department of Anesthesiology database from 2001 to 2005, examined and analyzed the complications of 6,773 patients.

Results appear in the March issue of the World Journal of Surgery.

Find more details from the full report.