ArticleAnnals of surgery2026
Predicting Protracted Recovery and Long-Term Loss of Independence after Major Surgery in Veterans.
Article in Annals of surgery, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
importanceSurgery often has lasting impacts on quality of life, which requires outcome measurement beyond 30 days. Even when long-term outcomes are measured, point-of-care risk calculators have not been developed for long-term outcomes.
objectiveTo develop a risk calculator for protracted recovery and loss of independence after surgery. DESIGN, SETTING, AND
participantsThis retrospective cohort study used all Veterans Affairs (VA) Surgical Quality Improvement Program data (2016-2019) linked to a variety of VA data sources. We captured a broad range of candidate predictors and used LASSO regression (a statistical method for variable selection) to estimate a predictive model. EXPOSURE: Surgical care in VA hospitals. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Trajectories of postoperative recovery, divided into two groups: (1) routine or slow recovery (0-60 day recovery) and (2) protracted recovery or loss of independence (6 months or more).
resultsThe strongest predictor of protracted recovery or loss of independence was the Care Assessment Needs score for 90-day hospitalization, followed by functional status. The model had high discriminative power across training and test samples (c-statistics .906-.908) and was highly sensitive (83.0-83.6%) and specific (82.4-82.5%). Gradient boosting (tree-based machine learning) models did not achieve substantially better performance (c-statistic 0.920).
conclusionsWe developed a risk calculator for long-term trajectories of postoperative recovery. Identifying patients at high risk for loss of independence or protracted recovery may allow for targeted interventions to improve outcomes for these patients. Developing risk calculators for long-term surgical outcomes is feasible and requires future work on risk communication for shared decision-making.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.