Anaesthesia for patients with cardiac disease. Intraoperative management

The risks of anaesthesia and surgery may be very much higher for patients with cardiac disease than for healthy patients. Now that the chief risk factors are known, efforts to identify and correct cardiovascular perturbations during anaesthesia in patients with these factors are likely to be rewarded by lower morbidity and mortality. Extensive cardiovascular monitoring techniques widely used in anaesthesia for cardiac surgery are applicable in patients with cardiac disease undergoing non-cardiac surgery.