Former President Mr Ronald Reagan will undergo surgery today after breaking his hip in a fall at his Los Angeles home yesterday.
A spokeswoman said Mr Reagan (89), who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease several years after leaving office in 1989, was in stable condition at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica.
"He is fully alert, in good humor and in stable condition", she said of America's 40th president, who left office more popular than any of his predecessors after leading a conservative revival that changed America's political and economic landscape.
The spokeswoman had no information about how Mr Reagan fell and could not supply details about the injury, but said he was taken to the hospital by Secret Service agents, accompanied by his wife and former first lady Nancy Reagan.
Dr Paul Beaule, an orthopedic surgeon at the Joint Replacement Institute at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Mr Reagan, like any other patient suffering a similar injury, would need either hip replacement surgery or to have stainless steel plates or pins inserted in the fractured bones.
Dr Beaule said surgeons would choose between those options depending on the location and nature of the fracture. He said either surgery would typically take between 60 and 90 minutes and could involve a hospital stay of up to 10 days. He said a long rehabilitation process is key to recovery and patients suffering from Alzheimer's can have difficulty following a physical therapy regimen and are at a higher risk of dislocating the hip after surgery.
Mr Reagan's treatment since his diagnosis with Alzheimer's has been largely taken on by his wife, who has found it painful to watch him deteriorate mentally. Last year, she published a book of his love letters to her.
The former president, who will turn 90 on February 6, survived a 1981 assassination attempt that put a bullet near his heart, a 1985 colon cancer operation and 1987 prostate and skin-cancer surgery.
Reuters