Increasing Frailty, Not Increasing Age, Results in Increased Length of Stay Following Vestibular Schwannoma Surgery

Objective: Understand the frailty of vestibular schwannoma surgical patients and how frailty impacts clinical course. Study Design: Retrospective Cohort. Setting: Single-tertiary academic hospital. Patients: All patients undergoing vestibular schwannoma surgery. Intervention: The modified frailty index (mFI) was calculated for all patients undergoing surgery for vestibular schwannoma between 2011 and 2018. Patient demographics and medical history, perioperative course, and postoperative complications were obtained from the medical record. Main Outcome Measures: The primary endpoint was hospital length of stay (LOS). Secondary endpoint was postoperative complications. Basic statistical analysis was performed including multivariate linear regressions to determine independent predictors of LOS. Results: There were 218 patients included and the mean age was 48.1 ± 0.9 (range 12–77). One-hundred ten patients were male (50.5%). The mean ICU LOS was 1.6 ± 0.1 days while mean total hospital LOS was 4.3 ± 0.2. There were 145 patients (66.5%) who were robust (nonfrail) with an mFI of 0, while 73 (33.5%) had an mFI of ≥1. Frailty (mFI≥2) was associated with longer hospital LOS compared with the prefrail ( p = 0.0014) and robust ( p = 0.0004) groups, but was not associated with increased complications (OR = 1.3; 95% CI: 0.5–3.7; p = 0.5925) or ICU LOS ( p > 0.05). In multivariate analysis, increased mFI, and NOT increased age, was an independent risk factor for increased hospital LOS ( p = 0.027). Conclusion: Increasing frailty, and not increasing age, is an independent risk factor for longer hospital LOS, but not for increased postoperative complications. Patients’ frailty status may be useful preoperatively in counselling patients about postoperative expectations and frail vestibular schwannoma patients may require increased health spending costs given their increased hospital LOS.