Abstract
Arteriosclerosis has been well known to be intimately connected with the human aging process, and thus the prevalence of coronary artery disease in creases with the advance of age.
On the other hand, senility seems to cause extra surgical risk when a patient undergoes a major operation such as coronary artery revascularization. In the past, physicians, and perhaps patients too, took a conservative attitude toward coronary artery bypass surgery for aged patients. But in the author's experience with 38 patients aged seventy years or more, there were 3 deaths (7.9%), a mortality rate not significantly different from that (4.9%) of another group of 264 patients aged less than seventy years. Thus, the author concludes that cur rently coronary artery bypass surgery can be safely performed upon Chinese septuagenarians with limited surgical risks and satisfactory consequences.
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