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Saturday Morning News

Reagan to Undergo Surgery for Broken Hip

Aired January 13, 2001 - 9:01 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: But we begin with news of a former president, Ronald Reagan faces surgery today to repair the right hip that he broke in a fall at his California home yesterday. Mr. Reagan will be 90 years old next month and he has Alzheimer's disease and that my play a role in his recovery.

A statement from his chief of staff said simply President Reagan fell at his home in Bel Air. He will undergo surgery Saturday morning at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, to repair a fracture to his right hip. He is fully alert, in good humor and in stable condition, end of the statement.

CNN's Jim Hill is at the medical center in Santa Monica and he joins us with the latest from there.

Good morning, Jim.

JIM HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Miles.

The ex-president spent the past night resting here at St. John's Medical or Health Center, rather, in Santa Monica preparing for the surgery this morning. It's supposed to take place at an undisclosed time. We understand this operation to apparently put a metal pin into the former president's right hip could take up to three hours to perform. His wife, Nancy Reagan, is with him in the hospital here.

As a matter of fact, the family spokeswoman says that Mrs. Reagan has been with her husband throughout the day during the accident and attended him on the way here to the hospital and has been with him through the night.

Now, of course, Mr. Reagan is now just a few weeks away from his 90th birthday. As you say he does have Alzheimer's disease. That revealed, of course, in an emotional letter to the American people in 1994. The president taking a rather low profile ever since then but now, of course, back in the hopes and wishes of all people in this country as he faces this surgery just shy of his 90th birthday - Miles.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Jim Hill, actually it's Kyra. Miles stepped away for a moment to get our e-mail going. Thank you very much. We're going to go more now for or about, rather, the surgery that Mr. Reagan will face and we're joined by our CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen once again. Boy, you've been covering all kinds of things for us, laser surgery, Ronald Reagan.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Multipurpose.

PHILLIPS: There you go. All right, why don't you update us? Let's - well, why don't we begin with sort of a review of the surgery and how easy this could be ...

COHEN: Sure.

PHILLIPS: ... or how difficult it could be?

COHEN: It's a very routine surgery. There are approximately 350,000 cases of broken hips in the United States every year and we can take a look at the hip joint to see what's involved in this surgery. It's what's called a ball and socket joint, much like the shoulder. The femur fits into the hip joint and the break usually occurs in the femur itself. There are two different locations where it often happens, one is in the neck of the femur and the other is further down in the femur. Now we've been told that President Reagan is going to have pins put in. What they do is they realign the bones so that they're aligned in the right way, they put the pins in and the surgery is relatively short. It's only an hour to an hour and a half. The patients are then usually in the hospital for about two to six days. They try to get patients walking as quickly as possible. The reason why they do that is they want to prevent bedsores, they want to prevent blood clots in the legs, they want to prevent pneumonia. So unlike in the olden days where they would keep people in bed now they want to get people walking as early as possible and then after that for the next month or two after the surgery patients have physical therapy.

Now let's take a look at the statistics for recovery. Only 25 percent of patients will make a full recovery and what we mean by that is that they will return to their previous level of independence and even when they do make that full recovery it can take up to a year. Forty percent of the patients will require some form of nursing home care, 20 percent of the patients will die within a year of the surgery.

PHILLIPS: Why is the mortality rate so high?

COHEN: That is high and it's not because of the surgery itself. The surgery itself is actually relatively simple, it's because, as doctor's explain it, the fact that the hip was broken is a - is a marker that a person is having troubles. For example, you often hear about women, older women, falling and breaking their hips. Well that's a sign that they're weak. It's the sign that they were on the road to becoming debilitated and so the surgery itself is not the cause, it's the surgery is really just a marker for something that's going on with that person. For example - the example with an Alzheimer's patient, and I'm not speaking here of President Reagan specifically, but Alzheimer's patients might forget how to walk and if they're forgetting how to walk they might also forget how to swallow and choke on their food. PHILLIPS: Well, the good news they say ...

COHEN: Ronald Reagan is in good ...

PHILLIPS: ... has a good sense of humor right now ...

COHEN: That's right. Absolutely.

PHILLIPS: ... so that's part of it.

COHEN: Absolutely and that's important. That's very important.

PHILLIPS: All right, Elizabeth Cohen, thanks so much.

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