Increased Step Count after Surgery Associated with Decreased Rate of Postoperative Complications

Gehl CJ, Verhagen NB, Shaik TJ, et al. Association of Daily Step Count and Postoperative Complications among All of Us Research Participants. J Am Coll Surg. 2024, in press.

This study examined the relationship between daily step count, as a surrogate for physical activity, and the risk for postoperative complications.

The authors used data from the All Of Us research database; this database records medical and patient-provided health data. Step counts were recorded from wearable devices and entered directly into the electronic health record. Operative procedures were chosen from the NSQIP-targeted procedures dataset.

A total of 27,150 patients who had recorded preoperative step counts underwent surgical procedures; the overall complication rate was 12.6%. The data showed that patients who recorded 7,500 daily steps or more had significantly fewer complications. The relationship between step count and reduced complication risk remained after adjustments for age, sex, comorbid disease, race, BMI, and procedure risk.

The authors concluded that use of data from wearable devices could potentially be a useful method for determining operative risk.