Surgery Risk for Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Published on July 29, 2016 Patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) face an elevated risk of perioperative complications; the risk is even higher if the diagnosis has not been made before surgery. This is so for many OSA patients, as Philipp Fassbender and colleagues point out in a review in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International. In these patients with OSA, sedation and anesthesia weaken the activation of the airway-opening muscles just as sleep does, potentially leading to airway obstruction. This elevates the risk of perioperative complications—eg, because of difficult intubation—in patients with OSA. Thus, as the authors stress, it …
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