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How well will a particular patient withstand the stresses of surgery? To make that determination, surgeons typically order cardiovascular tests. Is his heart pumping efficiently? Are her lungs providing enough oxygen? But Dr. Mark Katlic never found that sufficient for older patients.

They undergo lots of operations, because “almost all the conditions that require surgery increase with increasing age,” Dr. Katlic, a thoracic surgeon who has published several textbooks on geriatric surgery, told me. But surgery is also riskier for the elderly, he said: “Longer length of stay. More complications. Higher risk of death.”

For years, Dr. Katlic wanted a more specialized surgical approach for older people. Last fall, he persuaded executives at the nonprofit health organization LifeBridge in Baltimore to take that step. The Sinai Center for Geriatric Surgery, which he directs, is one of the first to focus on elderly surgical patients, and it is already collecting information on what improves their experiences in the operating room and afterward.

Here, every prospective patient over age 75 undergoes a pre-operative screening much more thorough than those normally used in hospitals. At the Sinai Center, for instance, nurse practitioners administer tests of frailty, including assessments of grip strength and walking speed, that have been shown to predict how older patients will withstand surgery. They test for cognitive decline, depression and hearing loss, and review all the medications that patients take — and since nearly all have several chronic illnesses, they typically take a lot of them. Separately, the center gives caregivers a questionnaire to determine how they will handle the stresses of caring for an older person after surgery.

“These are fairly simple tests that any well-trained nurse could do,” Dr. Katlic said. They add only about 20 minutes to pre-operative screening, he said, and the added cost is negligible.

Armed with this information, the staff can work to prevent a patient from becoming delirious in the hospital or call in a social worker to arrange support for an overburdened caregiver. “We hope that we’ll shorten length of stay and reduce costs and prevent complications,” Dr. Katlic said.

It’s too soon to know if that will happen. The center opened late last September, and so far its affiliated surgeons have seen about 300 older patients and performed a wide range of procedures, from cardiac surgery to cataract removal and knee replacements. Researchers are still collecting data on how the patients — many in their 80s and 90s, one 104 — fared afterward.

Several geriatricians and surgeons I asked about this approach, none of them involved with the Sinai Center, thought it made sense. When it comes to medical treatment, age really is just a number, they said. Research shows that some 85-year-olds will benefit even from fairly extensive procedures if they have, in doctor speak, the “physiologic reserve” to rebound from surgery and hospitalization. Others may never regain their previous ability to function, even if doctors fix the problem they came in with.

“The so-called eyeball test — the ability to look at someone’s strength, muscle mass and walking speed — is a better test than any echocardiogram and all the other fancy technology we use to try to see who will do well after surgery,” said Dr. Martin A. Makary, a pancreatic surgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who has done extensive research on frailty. One of his studies found that with careful screening, patients over age 80 recovered well after surgery for pancreatic cancer.

Yet, because hospitalization and surgery carry their own dangers, you would expect that after all this screening, surgeons at a geriatric center would sometimes counsel their patients that the risks of a given procedure outweigh the possible benefits.

Dr. Makary, for instance, likes to escort his older patients on a walk down the hall and around the corner in his office. When he sees someone struggling to maintain balance, walking very slowly or becoming short of breath, he may say something like, “This surgery has an extremely high risk, and given the 10 to 20 percent chance of a cure, we can do it. But if it were me, I’d choose not to.”

This doesn’t seem to be happening at the Sinai Center, where so far very few patients have decided against surgery. “This probably won’t lower the number of operations a surgeon is doing,” Dr. Katlic said. “But it might modify or change the operations to be less invasive, more focused on quality of life than length of life.”

Amen to that. But if my parent were confronting this decision, I’d like to know that a surgeon was also prepared to warn us away from the operating room altogether.

Still, because a growing number of people will face late-life decisions about surgery, it will be useful to have results from a specialized geriatric surgical center. Dr. Katlic is already fielding inquiries from hospitals in other cities that are interested in starting their own.