[Drug intolerance reactions in the perioperative phase--pathophysiology, diagnosis, therapy]

The increase in allergic reactions compels the anaesthetist to exercise great care when administering anaesthetics exclusively intravenously, because anaphylactic or anaphylactoid reactions can become a life-threatening problem for the patient within a very short time. Unfortunately the information given by patients is often very incomplete and the risk of allergic reactions is not eliminated by false positive or negative results in the skin test. There are only a few drugs available as antigens for the RAST test. Apart from avoiding histamine-releasing drugs, this information gap can only be countered in high-risk patients by preoperative prophylaxis with H1 and H2 receptor antagonists.