Increased Risk of Intraoperative Awareness in Patients with a History of Awareness

摘要

Background: Patients with a history of intraoperative awareness with explicit recall (AWR) are hypothesized to be at higher risk for AWR than the general surgical population. In this study, the authors assessed whether patients with a history of AWR (1) are actually at higher risk for AWR; (2) receive different anesthetic management; and (3) are relatively resistant to the hypnotic actions of volatile anesthetics.Methods: Patients with a history of AWR and matched controls from three randomized clinical trials investigating prevention of AWR were compared for relative risk of AWR. Anesthetic management was compared with the use of the Hotelling's T~2 statistic.