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Poor Memory Common After Surgery NEW YORK (Reuters) -- If you've ever felt "fuzzy" or "out of sorts" after having general anesthesia, you're not alone. A study suggests that as many as one out of four people over age 60 have problems with memory, concentration, and other intellectual skills after surgery, a cluster of problems known as cognitive dysfunction. The problem can persist for weeks or months, according to a report in The Lancet. At 13 hospitals throughout the US and Europe, a team of researchers found that 25.8% of patients over 60 had low scores on memory tests conducted one week after surgery compared with 3.4% of their same age peers who did not undergo surgery. Three months after surgery, cognitive problems persisted in 9.9% of the patients compared with 2.8% of people who did not undergo surgery. The 1,218 patients in the study had undergone general anesthesia for various types of major surgery, excluding heart surgery. Those who were most likely to suffer from long-term problems had early postoperative cognitive dysfunction, were older, were under anesthesia for a longer period of time, had little education or had complicating infections or respiratory problems, according to the report. But by 3 months after surgery, increasing age was the only significant risk factor. The research team, led by Dr. J.T. Moller of Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, monitored the patients' blood pressure before and after surgery, as well as the levels of oxygen in their blood vessels, to see if their brains were deprived of oxygen. But they found no relationship between these variables and postoperative cognitive impairment. "We were unable to find any specific risk factors to which therapeutic or preventive measures could be directed," Moller's team writes. Along with the memory tests, patients also completed a questionnaire about activities of daily living, such as dressing, bathing, shopping, and meal preparation. Patients who were still cognitively impaired 3 months after surgery reported significantly more difficulty with such activities than those who were not cognitively impaired. According to the researchers, this result "suggests that patients with postoperative cognitive dysfunction need more assistance with everyday actions than before surgery." SOURCE: The Lancet (1998;351:857-861)