Results of the study of more than 19,000 patients at nine medical centers were published in the Jan. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Cataract surgery is the most commonly performed operation in elderly people in developed countries.
In the United States, more than 1.5 million cataract operations are performed each year. The surgery is most often done on an outpatient basis using local anesthesia, and death rates are very low. Because cataract patients are usually older and have illnesses, physicians routinely order preoperative tests. At the nine medical centers including Hopkins' Wilmer Eye Institute, researchers randomly assigned more than 19,000 elective cataract operations to be preceded or not preceded by a standard battery of medical tests. Any medical complications occurring on the day of surgery or during the following seven days were recorded.