Forced-Air Warming and Resistive Heating Devices. Updated Perspectives on Safety and Surgical Site Infections.

Perioperative hypothermia is one of the most common phenomena seen among surgical patients, leading to numerous adverse outcomes such as intraoperative blood loss, cardiac events, coagulopathy, increased hospital stay and associated costs. Forced air warming (FAW) and resistive heating (RH) are the two most commonly used and widely studied devices to prevent perioperative hypothermia. The effect of FAW on operating room laminar flow and surgical site infection is unclear and we initiated an extensive literature search in order to get a scientific insight of this aspect.