[Anesthetic management and postoperative outcome: preface and comments]

Minimizing postoperative morbidity and mortality is a fundamental objective of clinical anesthesiology. It is important to realize that anesthesia and perioperative management exert bilateral influence forming inseparable relationship between them. One side of influence is that preoperative assessment of patient's condition and management of medical illness to reduce risk, as well as to optimize postoperative care to establish cardiorespiratory stability and pain relief, constitute an important part of anesthesia management. The other side of influence is that anesthetic management significantly affects perioperative and even longer-term consequence, which has been increasingly recognized based on the findings in basic and animal research and accumulated clinical evidence. This series of articles reviews the current knowledge on several aspects of the association between anesthetic management and postoperative outcome. More effort should be devoted to clarify the clinical significance of such consequences by accomplishing series of well organized and properly designed clinical research in conjunction with basic experiments.