Journal of plastic surgery and hand surgery
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J Plast Surg Hand Surg · Jan 2015
Increased anaesthesia duration increases venous thromboembolism risk in plastic surgery: A 6-year analysis of over 19,000 cases using the NSQIP dataset.
Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, particularly in the postoperative setting. Various risk stratification schema exist in the plastic surgery literature, but do not take into account variations in procedure length. The putative risk of VTE conferred by increased length of time under anaesthesia has never been rigorously explored. ⋯ This study validates the long-held view that increased surgical duration confers risk of VTE, as well as benchmarks VTE rates in plastic surgery procedures. While this in itself does not suggest an intervention, surgical time under general anaesthesia would be a useful addition to existing risk models in plastic surgery.