Abstract
We made a clinico-statistical observation of infective patients undergoing general anesthesia or monitored anesthesia care during a ten year period (1990-1999) in the operating room at Okayama University Dental Hospital. The preoperative prevalence of syphilis, HBV, and HCV seropositivity, MRSA infection and other infections were retrospectively investigated in 2, 246 cases. In result, the total infective cases were 160 cases (7.1% of all), and the seropositivities of syphilis, HBV, and HCV, and MRSA infection were 0.6%, 1.6%, 4.6%, and 0.3% of all, respectively. HCV seropositivity was the most common and 64.4% of the infective cases. Elderly patients (>=65 yearsold) were 20.4% of all, and the percentage of infective cases in the elderly patients was high (10.7%), resulting from the increase in HCV seropositive elderly cases. Compared with the HBV seropositive cases, the percentage of the cases of liver dysfunction was significantly higher in the HCV seropositive cases . These findings suggested that a strong attention must always be paid to preoperative infection as a preoperative risk factor.
