Your Guide to Delirium Prediction Tools That (Mostly) Work

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Postoperative delirium (POD) is the unwanted houseguest of spine surgery — rare, unpredictable, and always turning up at the worst possible time. It can derail recoveries, confuse families, and occasionally make your patient insist that the PACU nurse is a medieval knight.

So along come three delirium risk tools — DRAS (Delirium Risk Assessment Score), DRAT (Delirium Risk Assessment Tool), and DEAR (Delirium Elderly At-Risk) — each promising to predict who’s at risk before your patient wakes up quoting Shakespeare. But do they actually work for lumbar fusion patients?