Perioperative outcomes: Are we asking the right questions?

Excerpt

Clinical research in anesthesia has typically focused on four broad areas: 1) mechanistic studies to help clinicians better understand anesthetic pathophysiology and applied pharmacology, 2) postoperative pain relief, 3) studies using surrogate markers of adverse organ function during and after surgery, and 4) technical and safety improvements in our specialty. These studies can advance knowledge and practice in anesthesia and perioperative medicine. Nevertheless, when compared with many other areas of medicine, anesthesiologists have been relatively slow to adopt the pursuit of large clinical trials that focus on “hard endpoints”, especially those that incorporate patient-centred outcome measures. …