Perioperative Anesthetic Management and Patient’s Long-term Prognosis

Abstract

It is generally assumed that perioperative short-term mortality and morbidity of patients is greatly affected by preoperative physical status and intraoperative management of patients, but does anesthetic management really have an impact on the long-term prognosis or life prognosis of surgical patients? In cancer treatment, surgical resection is a mainstay of therapy, but it is undeniable that dissemination of cancer cells to adjacent organs and tissues and suppression of cellular immunity associated with surgical stress may result in cancerous metastasis and recurrence. If differences in anesthetic technique and management accelerate immune suppression and incidence of the recurrence of cancer, anesthesiologists should become sensitive to this fact and try to manage anesthesia giving full consideration to patients’ prognosis. Ensuring perioperative patient safety is a primary mission of anesthesiologists, but we have to broaden our vision to patient’s long-term life prognosis as well.