Intraoperative Stress Test With Dobutamine and Speckle Tracking to Decrease Postoperative Mortality

Perioperative adverse cardiovascular events are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality after noncardiac surgery. The implications of perioperative cardiac complications on morbidity and mortality, in-hospital and long-term care, and resource utilization are enormous. The continuously increasing proportion of elderly patients presenting for noncardiac surgery raises serious concerns regarding adverse cardiac events in the perioperative period. The responsibility for early diagnosis and prompt treatment of cardiac complications during surgery rests squarely with the anesthesiologist. Reliable intraoperative identification of patients at high risk for postoperative AMI and/or death is currently inadequate, but may confer substantial benefits to patients as preventive measures could be instituted. A reliable and reproducible quantitative measure of regional and global myocardial function could improve preoperative risk stratification and guide anesthetic management when acute changes in myocardial function occur.

In the present study is hypothesized that intraoperative dobutamine stress echocardiography by 2-dimensional speckle tracking echocardiography can identify patients at higher risk of perioperative adverse cardiac events.