New Scientist
Image: National Institutes of Health Library
The operating theatre is booked, the surgeon is ready – but is your body? A new blood test can help predict whether you’ll need days or weeks to recover from surgery.
Surgery is a stressful experience for your body. The trauma of going under the knife puts your immune system into a state of high alert and floods the blood with immune cells that can trigger harmful inflammation.
As a result, some people are confined to bed for weeks after an operation. But others can be back on their feet within days. Researchers suspect the difference lies in the way the immune system responds to the stress of surgery but they have had little luck finding strong links between immune system activity and recovery times.
Until now, that is. A team of anaesthesiologists, immunologists and microbiologists at Stanford University in California has used a new cell-mapping technique to identify an “immune signature” in the hours following surgery that can predict recovery times. Read more on newscientist.com…
