• M Damm and A Hübler.
• Klinik und Poliklinik für Anästhesiologie und Intensivtherapie, Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus, Fetscherstrasse 74, Dresden, Germany. martin.damm@uniklinikum-dresden.de
• Anaesthesist. 2011 Nov 1;60(11):1065-80; quiz 1081-2.

AbstractThe demographic change is associated with an increasing number of elderly patients with serious comorbidities. The prevalence of coronary heart disease in particular increases with age and raises the risk of perioperative myocardial ischemia. In the last few years various interventions have been evaluated to lower the perioperative risk for serious cardiovascular events. This includes cardioprotective medical interventions, for example with β-receptor blockers and statins. Current guidelines recommend that patients who are on β-receptor blockers or statins for chronic treatment of cardiovascular diseases should continue this medication throughout the perioperative period. Myocardial conditioning has been assessed to be effective under numerous experimental conditions and clinical trials have also provided evidence for myocardial protection by conditioning. Besides ischemic and anesthetic-induced preconditioning the noninvasive technique of remote preconditioning offers interesting possibilities, especially for patients with serious comorbidities; however, large scale randomized clinical multicentre trials are still needed. Regarding cardioprotective effectiveness, the clinical data for regional anesthesia are very heterogeneous; nevertheless regional anesthesia is very effective in postoperative pain therapy. Therefore regional anesthesia should be used as a part of multimodal therapy concepts to lower the risk of perioperative cardiovascular events.

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