Postoperative delirium scares patients and families. Two ways to prevent it: minimize narcotic pain medications, which trigger altered mental states, and enter surgery well-nourished. A spine-fusion study found patients with better nutritional status had significantly fewer delirium episodes.
A really scary thing for family members or even the patient who's going through surgery is when somebody has delirium or altered mental state after surgery. So how can you avoid that? Well, one of the clearer things you can do is avoid narcotics, but recent data actually suggests that nutritional status plays a role in this. So a study looked at spine fusion and found that those who had a better nutritional state going into surgery were much less likely to experience delirium. So this really just speaks to the idea of trying to optimize your overall health to get through without complications. Complications and recover faster.
