Surgery for cancer in the elderly: state of the art

The elderly present generally more extensive and advanced cancer. Once the diagnosis of cancer has been placed in the elderly, the decision of the treatment would seem to be correlated with the age.The literature suggests that cancer surgery patients older than 80 years, who underwent surgery or radiation therapy, have worse outcomes when compared with young patients with similar cancer. However, analysis derived from more recent studies consider the age as an independent risk factor, including the chronological age only in the pre-operative risk factors