The Presence of Red Hair Associated MC1R Mutations and the Incidence of Perioperative Anesthesia Complications: A Cohort Study

Background Perioperative complications may be associated with both suffering for the affected individuals, and a high cost for society. Available means for identifying individuals at risk should be considered.

Objective To investigate whether patients with MC1R variants (Asp84Glu, Arg142His Arg151Cys, Tyr152Ochre, Ile155Thr, Arg160Trp, Arg213Trp, Asp294His, or Arg306His) associated with red hair, or having a red hair phenotype have an increased incidence of anesthesia related perioperative complications.

Method This is a retrospective registry-based study including patients from one Swedish cohort (MAICS), and one British cohort (UKBB). MAICS is aggregation of four different cohorts; PronMed, Epihealth, Simpler, and the Swedish Twin Registry (STR). The Patients are selected from the Swedish National Patient Registry (NPR), and the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES)/NHS England using surgical and medical procedure codes known for requiring an anesthetic management in the form of general anesthesia, spinal/epidural anesthesia or regional anesthesia.

Eligible patients are associated with genotype data, and stratified into either homozygote/compound heterozygote, heterozygote, or wildtype to be able to assess whether a dose-response relationship exists between the different levels of exposures. From UKBB, a separate analysis of the association between red hair phenotype and perioperative complications is performed.

Outcome ascertainment, and the defining of cases and non-cases, is perfomed using healthcare linkage to Swedish Perioperative Registry (SPOR), Swedish Intensive Care Register (SIR), National cause of death registry (DORS), Statistics Sweden, and UKBB.