Guest editors:
Nandor Marczin, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Marcelo Gama de Abreu, Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus, Dresden, Germany
Laura Pasin, Ospedale S.Antonio, Padova, Italy
Our specialty is facing multiple challenges as surgical patients are increasingly of advanced age and present with complex co-morbidities for ever-growing spectrum of high-risk surgical interventions. Beyond the provision of routine intraoperative anesthesia, our tasks have grown to integrate preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative activities to risk stratify, mitigate and treat perioperative complications, and early recognize and treat adverse events that might result in organ injury, as a means to reduce morbidity and improve survival and quality of life on the long run.
While perioperative medicine is a multispecialty team approach to facilitate the best possible patient outcomes in the surgical setting, anesthesia occupies a strategic place to coordinate collaborative strategies across the continuum of patient care. Indeed, in their inspirational editorial a decade ago, Evers and Miller challenged the specialty for intellectual malaise and identified such areas as the main pillars of future anesthesia mission.
“We need to take ownership of the substantial perioperative morbidity and mortality (1 death per 1,000 cases) that is the reality of modern American surgery. There are underrecognized problems in perioperative medicine that kill tens of thousands of Americans annually and incapacitate many more. Postoperative renal failure, systemic inflammatory response syndrome, and cognitive dysfunction provide a few examples of such public health problems. Before we can invigorate research, we must identify, publicize, and embrace the problems that need to be solved. Compelling and solvable problems will attract the best and brightest to our field…” Their wording and instructions for academic perioperative medicine surely go beyond practice in the USA and have motivated major single centre, collaborative and multinational endeavors in combatting postoperative adverse events and in improving care of the high-risk patient.
In order to explore the interests of our audience, and to make our colleagues in the field aware, BMC Anesthesiology is pleased to launch a thematic series dedicated to highlighting the major developments in perioperative care for the last decade. The principle motivation of this series is to specifically revisit the efforts anesthesia has provided towards taking ownership of the postoperative adverse events, especially those targeting major systemic or specific organ dysfunction following major surgery. We especially welcome submissions from current and future collaborative networks highlighting their clinical and fundamental translational activities to combat postoperative cardiac, pulmonary, renal and neurological complications including postoperative delirium. Among systemic events the scope of the thematic series includes, but is not limited to perioperative inflammation and oxidative stress. We hope that beyond the state of art, these collaborations will also provide authorative road maps for the future clinical and research agenda for the next decade. The series also calls for papers from individual or single centre investigators whose findings have the potential to significantly improve patient care in the perioperative setting.
Please submit directly to BMC Anesthesiology, stating in your cover letter that it is for the “A decade of progress in perioperative care” thematic series. Alternatively, you can email your pre-submission queries to the Editor of BMC Anesthesiology at guangde.tu@biomedcentral.com.
