March 28, 2024

Clues to how people bounce back from surgery

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the big frustrations of surgery: There’s little way to know if you’ll be a fast or slow healer, someone who feels back to normal in a week or is out of work for a month with lingering pain and fatigue.

Now Stanford University researchers have discovered that right after surgery, patients’ blood harbors clues about how fast they’ll bounce back — and it has to do with the activity of certain immune cells that play a key role in healing.

The work one day may lead to a test to predict who’ll need more care, or maybe even if an operation is the best choice., but scientists don’t know what biology explains why some people recover so much faster than someone else who’s equally sick.

The Stanford team took an unusually close look at 32 otherwise fairly healthy people who underwent a first-time hip replacement. They took blood samples from the patients before surgery and at several points afterward, and questioned them pain, fatigue and other elements of recovery every few days for six weeks.

Some experienced only mild pain just two days after surgery, while others didn’t report their pain was mostly gone until 36 days later.

Patients’ blood shows an immune signature of recovery that accounts for much of their variability in recovery time — a pattern of activity in certain immune cells that are first responders to the injury site, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.