According to a study presented at the Anesthesiology 2014 Annual Meeting, anesthesia-related complications have dropped by more than 50% since 2010.
Dr. Adrian Liau and a team of researchers examined a total number 3.2 million anesthesia cases from 2010 to 2014. Looking at the data they have gathered, the team saw a decline in anesthesia complications from 11.8 percent to 4.8 percent.
While it is great news that there has been a significant decline in complications, Dr. Jeana E. Havidich, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H, a co-author of the study, says that they have also discovered that the mortality rate that relates to the use of anesthetics has remained the same at 3 deaths per 10,000 procedures (0.03%) from 2010 to 2014.
According to Dr. Havidich, their research team aims to look at the incidences and the nature of surgical complications brought on by the use of anesthetics at the national level. At the same time, through their research, the team also aims to identify the risk factors of such incidences.
Dr. Havidich added that there has been a lot of studies regarding complications rooting from the use of anesthetics in surgical procedures but these previous studies were concentrated to specific types of anesthesia, specific procedures or specific patient populations.
According to the data the team has presented Anesthesiology annual meeting which was held in New Orléans, the most common major complication was medication error which comprises 11.71% of the cases while the most common minor complication was postoperative nausea and vomiting which comprises 35.53% of all cases.
Dr. Liau shares that while their study has involved a huge database, looking only at 4 years of information calls for an even more extensive research. Having said this the a study's lead author says that the are aiming at looking into an even larger sets of data in order to better understand the trends and patterns of anesthesia-related complications.
