> Delirium is associated with negative hospital outcomes including a tenfold increased risk of death, a fivefold increased risk of nosocomial complications (Inouye 2006), poor 1-year functional recovery, and postoperative cognitive decline (Saczynski et al. 2012). The long-term cognitive decline seen in some patients after the development of delirium is similar to that of Alzheimer’s patients (Pandharipande et al. 2013). With reports of up to 50 % of patients over 60 years old developing postoperative delirium following cardiac surgery (Rudolph et al. 2009), this patient population poses a major burden for healthcare.
When you go on bypass(needed if the heart is stopped to replace a valve) air emboli (very small air bubbles) go into the brain and can get lodged in capillaries cutting of blood flow. Personality changes are documented to occur after bypass and correlate with areas of the frontal cortex that die. Typically though this kind of injury is not progressive.
A quick search finds a few hits, e.g. from https://perioperativemedicinejournal.biomedcentral.com/artic...
> Delirium is associated with negative hospital outcomes including a tenfold increased risk of death, a fivefold increased risk of nosocomial complications (Inouye 2006), poor 1-year functional recovery, and postoperative cognitive decline (Saczynski et al. 2012). The long-term cognitive decline seen in some patients after the development of delirium is similar to that of Alzheimer’s patients (Pandharipande et al. 2013). With reports of up to 50 % of patients over 60 years old developing postoperative delirium following cardiac surgery (Rudolph et al. 2009), this patient population poses a major burden for healthcare.