ABSTRACT

The study of complications that follow the administration of anesthesia is challenging because their occurrence is infrequent and they are influenced by a number of different factors attributable to the patient, the surgical procedure, or the method or agent of anesthesia. Historically, there have been two common methods of studying complications in anesthesia. The first method is evaluation of cases, preferably prospectively, albeit many studies have been done retrospectively with a large cohort of cases. However, because the incidence of major complications in modern anesthesia is very low, an enormous amount of data set would be required to provide the study with sufficient power to detect significant differences. The second method is to study a single complication in an attempt to detect a pattern associated with the occurrence of that complication.