Article Text
Abstract
Perioperative morbidity and mortality related to anesthesia involves multiple factors. Patient characteristics and comorbidities play a role in many of these events, highlighting the importance of preoperative screening. While optimization of patient comorbidities is not always possible, having data regarding those comorbidities can prove life-saving. Equipment and medication considerations also enter into untoward outcomes such as anesthetic interventions outside of the traditional operating room where resources are sometimes lacking and haste creates errors. Ultimately, when surgeons and anesthesiologists cooperate in patient care, communicating concisely but thoroughly, patients are more likely to do well. The language of surgeons is that of diagnosis requiring a surgical intervention, while anesthesiologists are discussing patient comorbidities impacted by anesthetic medications, positive pressure ventilation, neuraxial techniques, ramifications of patient positioning, effects of opiates and so on. Because all of the considerations combine in determining outcomes, it is incumbent on both surgeons and anesthesiologists to understand those elements leading to severe morbid events as well as death. This review touches on many of the most important factors.
- anesthesia
- complications
- difficult airway
- obesity
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Footnotes
Contributors BC, CS and LC all contributed by way of additional information and editing of the manuscript written by JS.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement None of the data contained in the article is original as this is a review article compiling pertinent information from previously published sources.