Pgimer: Hip, hip, hurray! Docs perform hip replacement of 110-year-old woman

Delay and failure to treat such patients can be life-threatening, even more so in older patients that have been rendered immobile for a while. “There are many co-morbidities related to the surgery of older patients which put them at risk. Often they have high sugar or high BP, or they have blood clots because of how immobile they become by this age,” says Dr Goni who led the team that operated on the patient. According to Goni, Manjauki was lucky because she did not have many of these co-morbidities.

Manjauki claimed that she had never been to a doctor before and was reluctant to be touched by the hospital staff. “She didn’t like to be surrounded by us and even bit our anaesthesiologist on one occasion,” says Dr Goni. Manjauki is now eager to go back home to her village in Pratapgarh.

The doctors who operated on the woman allege she is probably one of the oldest patients to have undergone such a procedure in India. “We did some research and the oldest patient recorded to have undergone the procedure is a 106-year-old in Delhi. The Guinness Book of World Records states that the oldest person to have undergone the surgery in the world is 112 years old, so we are quite close!” Dr Goni says.

Elderly patients need an efficient team of doctors, including anaesthesiologists and cardiologists, in order to handle the surgery sensitively and allow the patients to recover from post-surgery trauma. The doctors say that the patient was able to stand the very next day after her surgery and is walking comfortably now.