When patients undergo any type of surgery after having had COVID, their odds of significant postoperative problems diminish with elapsed time from COVID diagnosis.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center now report that this trend of decreasing risk persists longer than previously known, for as long as 13 months after COVID. Their report appeared Dec. 14 in JAMA Network Open.
The researchers used electronic health record data from 3,997 adult surgical patients with a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection who underwent surgery at VUMC from March 2020 to December 2021. Time from COVID diagnosis to surgery was a median of 98 days.
Robert Freundlich, MD, MSCI, associate professor of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Informatics, who led the study with critical care medicine fellow John Bryant, MD.