Prehabilitation for Prevention of Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunction?

Surgery sets the old brain on fire and prehabilitation is a fire retardant. That’s conclusion of an interesting study by Kawano et. al.1 in this issue of the Journal. Specifically, they hypothesized that the old brain is more vulnerable than a young one to surgery-induced neuroinflammation because its innate immune cells, principally microglia, develop an exaggerated inflammatory response to a peripheral surgical procedure. Furthermore, in a...