Comment on “Depth of Anesthesia as a Risk Factor for Perioperative Morbidity”

Abstract EN

Petsiti and colleagues recent study on causal relationship between depth of anesthesia and perioperative morbidity [1] is an attractive opportunity to discuss a significant topic: what do we know about Deep Hypnotic Status (DHS) during general anesthesia (GA) and how can we recognize it? In truth, though significant steps have been taken by neuroscience and the knowledge of pharmacodynamics has been fine-tuned, we do not have a comprehensive view of what really happens to the brain during GA.

The real problem is driving the anesthesia in a middle earth, furthest from both the burst suppression and sudden emergencies.

Thus, if we cannot define the exact anesthesia level of our patient, how can we establish a correlation between DHS and postoperative complications and morbidity? While the authors correctly cited previous studies on the topic, nevertheless we meet Sigl [2] among the authors of one of these references.

It is not a big surprise for the scholars of brain monitoring because he was, along with Chamoun, the first to describe the bispectral (BIS) technology in 1994 [3].