scishow
Keep Calm And Recover From Surgery Faster
YouTube: | https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrbK0fTxxqk |
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Next: | A Vaccine That Makes Your Immune System ... Forget? |
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Statistics
View count: | 77,580 |
Likes: | 4,627 |
Comments: | 225 |
Duration: | 06:11 |
Uploaded: | 2023-12-21 |
Last sync: | 2024-11-26 06:00 |
Citation
Citation formatting is not guaranteed to be accurate. | |
MLA Full: | "Keep Calm And Recover From Surgery Faster." YouTube, uploaded by SciShow, 21 December 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrbK0fTxxqk. |
MLA Inline: | (SciShow, 2023) |
APA Full: | SciShow. (2023, December 21). Keep Calm And Recover From Surgery Faster [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrbK0fTxxqk |
APA Inline: | (SciShow, 2023) |
Chicago Full: |
SciShow, "Keep Calm And Recover From Surgery Faster.", December 21, 2023, YouTube, 06:11, https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrbK0fTxxqk. |
Can keeping calm before a surgery reduce negative outcomes? More than one study says "Yes."
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
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Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10302-z
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878875019314330?via%3Dihub
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10003609/
Images:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-stock-footage/1179240548
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/young-black-woman-patient-feel-worried-on-the-hospital-stock-footage/1423060467
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/stress-stock-footage/1439377279
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/doctor-talking-to-patient-stock-footage/1408958950
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-in-modern-stock-footage/614459048
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/taking-prescription-medication-stock-footage/1408049076
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-in-modern-stock-footage/1461471934
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-stock-footage/1179247683
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/patients-hospital-stock-footage/1401097389
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/surgeons-reviewing-and-discussing-mri-scans-in-operating-stock-footage/482150178
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/respiratory-machine-stock-footage/1413241346
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-stock-footage/1179230217
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/night-insomnia-sleep-disorder-disturbed-woman-bed-stock-footage/1309972618
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/depressed-asian-women-can-not-sleep-on-the-bed-insomnia-stock-footage/1337170260
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/asian-female-patients-sleep-in-hospital-saline-stock-footage/679763282
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/cortisol-molecule-stock-footage/1202360703
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/sad-mid-adult-man-thinking-at-home-stock-footage/918015586
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/doctors-and-nurses-celebrating-senior-man-leaving-the-stock-footage/1341739530
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
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Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scishow
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Huge thanks go to the following Patreon supporters for helping us keep SciShow free for everyone forever: Adam Brainard, Alex Hackman, Ash, Bryan Cloer, charles george, Chris Mackey, Chris Peters, Christoph Schwanke, Christopher R Boucher, Eric Jensen, Harrison Mills, Jaap Westera, Jason A, Saslow, Jeffrey Mckishen, Jeremy Mattern, Kevin Bealer, Matt Curls, Michelle Dove, Piya Shedden, Rizwan Kassim, Sam Lutfi
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Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
SciShow Tangents Podcast: https://scishow-tangents.simplecast.com/
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#SciShow #science #education #learning #complexly
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Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10302-z
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878875019314330?via%3Dihub
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10003609/
Images:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-stock-footage/1179240548
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/young-black-woman-patient-feel-worried-on-the-hospital-stock-footage/1423060467
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/stress-stock-footage/1439377279
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/doctor-talking-to-patient-stock-footage/1408958950
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-in-modern-stock-footage/614459048
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/taking-prescription-medication-stock-footage/1408049076
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-in-modern-stock-footage/1461471934
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-stock-footage/1179247683
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/patients-hospital-stock-footage/1401097389
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/surgeons-reviewing-and-discussing-mri-scans-in-operating-stock-footage/482150178
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/respiratory-machine-stock-footage/1413241346
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/medical-team-performing-surgical-operation-stock-footage/1179230217
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/night-insomnia-sleep-disorder-disturbed-woman-bed-stock-footage/1309972618
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/depressed-asian-women-can-not-sleep-on-the-bed-insomnia-stock-footage/1337170260
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/asian-female-patients-sleep-in-hospital-saline-stock-footage/679763282
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/cortisol-molecule-stock-footage/1202360703
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/sad-mid-adult-man-thinking-at-home-stock-footage/918015586
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/doctors-and-nurses-celebrating-senior-man-leaving-the-stock-footage/1341739530
Surgery is scary.
And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Research suggests that most people who are about to go into surgery get anxious about it.
I mean, it’s totally justified. When you undergo major surgery, the worst case scenario is a possibility. And, well, some studies have found that preoperative anxiety influences postoperative outcomes. So just keep calm and recover from surgery faster?
Yeah, it might actually work that way. [♪ INTRO] If you feel surgery anxiety, you’re definitely not alone. One study published in 2022 surveyed 400 people a few days before they had surgeries, and most of them were classified as having high or very high surgery anxiety. The survey used in this study is called the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and it measures how intense the responder’s anxiety is.
If you’re taking it, you answer questions about your anxiety with a 1 through 4, with higher numbers indicating more of the feeling. Since there are 20 questions, the minimum total score is 20 points. So if the participants had a final score over 40 points, they were put in the surgery anxiety group of the study.
And 60.5% of the participants fell into that category. Which means that most people were anxious about their upcoming surgery. And for some of them, that anxiety was associated with worse outcomes. Specifically, more people who were anxious about high-risk surgeries experienced postoperative complications.
In this study, “high risk” meant surgeries such as gastrectomies and esophageal resections, many of which require removing all or part of a tissue. “Complications” referred to a giant variety of postoperative events, from something you can take medicine for and recover from at home, to something that requires another surgery to improve, to something that kills you. Which is why so many people have surgery anxiety! People who were less anxious about their upcoming high-risk surgery ended up having complications in 31.4% of the cases.
That’s compared to people who were more anxious about their high-risk surgery, who ended up having complications in 45.2% of the cases. So, significantly more anxious people had post-surgery complications than their less anxious peers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that anxiety is what caused the complications.
Maybe these people were more anxious because they really had more to be anxious about. Or maybe their anxiety got in the way of their own health. It’s a classic chicken-or-egg question: Were they anxious because their surgeries were riskier, or did anxiety create more complications for them?
To answer at least part of that question, let’s go back in time to a 2019 study that investigated anxiety in 20 people getting brain surgery. By pretty much any standard, brain surgery qualifies as a high-risk operation. So we’re still comparing people who were more anxious and less anxious before a high-risk surgery.
But this time, everyone was going in for the same operation, so there was similar risk involved in each case. And everyone was awake, so researchers could ask them how they felt before, during, and after their brain surgery. You heard me.
It’s pretty common for people to be awake for their brain surgeries because it helps the surgeon know what part of the brain they’re poking around in based on the patient’s response. But, of course, there are still plenty of pain meds and local anesthesia. In fact, in this study, the researchers found that anxiety was not related to pain during surgery at all.
People who were more anxious before their brain surgery didn’t feel more pain when the surgery was happening than people who were less anxious about it. The difference between more and less anxious people turned out to be pain after the surgery. People with surgery anxiety said that they experienced more postoperative pain.
So the surgery itself wasn’t more risky or painful, and being awake for the surgery didn’t make people more anxious than they already were. But people with surgery anxiety still reported tougher recoveries. And some researchers think that’s because of how they slept.
This idea suggests that anxiety is just the tip of the iceberg. See, it often goes hand in hand with a lack of sleep. It may not be surprising that anxiety can keep you up at night.
But a lot of your body’s healing happens while you sleep, so this anxiety-sleep association could be related to the tougher recoveries reported. One study published in 2023 investigated this idea by assessing 330 people all going in for the same laparoscopic gynecological surgery. Modern medicine can put a camera almost anywhere!
These researchers split the study participants into those with high and low surgery anxiety, just like the previous studies did. And they found that high-anxiety patients had more trouble sleeping after their surgeries and reported more pain during the recovery period. To the point where people who had surgery anxiety ended up with longer hospital stays, filled with more vomiting and higher doses of pain medicine.
And cortisol may be at the root of it all. Cortisol is a stress hormone that dampens down the immune system, which, you know, you need to heal your body. So people with surgery anxiety may be making more of a hormone that lowers their immune response, and sleeping less, giving their bodies less opportunity to take advantage of any immune response that’s happening.
In the end, they don’t always recover from surgery as well as less anxious people do. Maybe the best thing to do going into a surgery is trust the process and believe that everything will be okay. But if that’s not your vibe, you’re still probably going to recover from that surgery just fine. Even in the more anxious groups, most people had no complications.
And, importantly, for lower risk surgeries, there was no difference between the more and less anxious groups. Not to mention, in these studies, death rates were not affected by anxiety across the board. Also, all of these findings were based on correlations, not controlled experiments. In fact, some analyses have found no significant difference between more and less anxious people.
But at minimum, none of them suggest that going into surgery with a serene state of mind is bad for you. And some of them suggest it can help. So keeping calm might really help you carry on!
Here at SciShow, our patrons help us carry on. By contributing $8 a month, you not only keep the show running, but you also get to hear an exclusive monthly podcast! In that podcast, the SciShow team answers Patron questions, provides commentary on previous videos, and goof around playing games.
It’s a fun community that we’d love you to be a part of over at patreon.com/scishow. [♪ OUTRO]
And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Research suggests that most people who are about to go into surgery get anxious about it.
I mean, it’s totally justified. When you undergo major surgery, the worst case scenario is a possibility. And, well, some studies have found that preoperative anxiety influences postoperative outcomes. So just keep calm and recover from surgery faster?
Yeah, it might actually work that way. [♪ INTRO] If you feel surgery anxiety, you’re definitely not alone. One study published in 2022 surveyed 400 people a few days before they had surgeries, and most of them were classified as having high or very high surgery anxiety. The survey used in this study is called the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and it measures how intense the responder’s anxiety is.
If you’re taking it, you answer questions about your anxiety with a 1 through 4, with higher numbers indicating more of the feeling. Since there are 20 questions, the minimum total score is 20 points. So if the participants had a final score over 40 points, they were put in the surgery anxiety group of the study.
And 60.5% of the participants fell into that category. Which means that most people were anxious about their upcoming surgery. And for some of them, that anxiety was associated with worse outcomes. Specifically, more people who were anxious about high-risk surgeries experienced postoperative complications.
In this study, “high risk” meant surgeries such as gastrectomies and esophageal resections, many of which require removing all or part of a tissue. “Complications” referred to a giant variety of postoperative events, from something you can take medicine for and recover from at home, to something that requires another surgery to improve, to something that kills you. Which is why so many people have surgery anxiety! People who were less anxious about their upcoming high-risk surgery ended up having complications in 31.4% of the cases.
That’s compared to people who were more anxious about their high-risk surgery, who ended up having complications in 45.2% of the cases. So, significantly more anxious people had post-surgery complications than their less anxious peers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that anxiety is what caused the complications.
Maybe these people were more anxious because they really had more to be anxious about. Or maybe their anxiety got in the way of their own health. It’s a classic chicken-or-egg question: Were they anxious because their surgeries were riskier, or did anxiety create more complications for them?
To answer at least part of that question, let’s go back in time to a 2019 study that investigated anxiety in 20 people getting brain surgery. By pretty much any standard, brain surgery qualifies as a high-risk operation. So we’re still comparing people who were more anxious and less anxious before a high-risk surgery.
But this time, everyone was going in for the same operation, so there was similar risk involved in each case. And everyone was awake, so researchers could ask them how they felt before, during, and after their brain surgery. You heard me.
It’s pretty common for people to be awake for their brain surgeries because it helps the surgeon know what part of the brain they’re poking around in based on the patient’s response. But, of course, there are still plenty of pain meds and local anesthesia. In fact, in this study, the researchers found that anxiety was not related to pain during surgery at all.
People who were more anxious before their brain surgery didn’t feel more pain when the surgery was happening than people who were less anxious about it. The difference between more and less anxious people turned out to be pain after the surgery. People with surgery anxiety said that they experienced more postoperative pain.
So the surgery itself wasn’t more risky or painful, and being awake for the surgery didn’t make people more anxious than they already were. But people with surgery anxiety still reported tougher recoveries. And some researchers think that’s because of how they slept.
This idea suggests that anxiety is just the tip of the iceberg. See, it often goes hand in hand with a lack of sleep. It may not be surprising that anxiety can keep you up at night.
But a lot of your body’s healing happens while you sleep, so this anxiety-sleep association could be related to the tougher recoveries reported. One study published in 2023 investigated this idea by assessing 330 people all going in for the same laparoscopic gynecological surgery. Modern medicine can put a camera almost anywhere!
These researchers split the study participants into those with high and low surgery anxiety, just like the previous studies did. And they found that high-anxiety patients had more trouble sleeping after their surgeries and reported more pain during the recovery period. To the point where people who had surgery anxiety ended up with longer hospital stays, filled with more vomiting and higher doses of pain medicine.
And cortisol may be at the root of it all. Cortisol is a stress hormone that dampens down the immune system, which, you know, you need to heal your body. So people with surgery anxiety may be making more of a hormone that lowers their immune response, and sleeping less, giving their bodies less opportunity to take advantage of any immune response that’s happening.
In the end, they don’t always recover from surgery as well as less anxious people do. Maybe the best thing to do going into a surgery is trust the process and believe that everything will be okay. But if that’s not your vibe, you’re still probably going to recover from that surgery just fine. Even in the more anxious groups, most people had no complications.
And, importantly, for lower risk surgeries, there was no difference between the more and less anxious groups. Not to mention, in these studies, death rates were not affected by anxiety across the board. Also, all of these findings were based on correlations, not controlled experiments. In fact, some analyses have found no significant difference between more and less anxious people.
But at minimum, none of them suggest that going into surgery with a serene state of mind is bad for you. And some of them suggest it can help. So keeping calm might really help you carry on!
Here at SciShow, our patrons help us carry on. By contributing $8 a month, you not only keep the show running, but you also get to hear an exclusive monthly podcast! In that podcast, the SciShow team answers Patron questions, provides commentary on previous videos, and goof around playing games.
It’s a fun community that we’d love you to be a part of over at patreon.com/scishow. [♪ OUTRO]