Popular Literature as an Educational Aid for History of Anesthesia.

Introduction: History of anesthesia can be learned through formal didactic lectures, discussions, tours, audiovisual media, general anesthesia textbooks, anesthesia history texts, and by popular literature.

Methods: We studied thirteen books that describe events and advances related to the discovery and development of modern anesthesia. Deliberately omitted were books that might be considered by some to be textbooks, because our aim was to explore the genre of popular literature.

Update on best practice recommendations for anesthetic perioperative care and pain management in weight loss surgery, 2004-2007.

To reevaluate and update evidence-based best practice recommendations published in 2004 for anesthetic perioperative care and pain management in weight loss surgery (WLS), we performed a systematic search of English-language literature on anesthetic perioperative care and pain management in WLS published between April 2004 and May 2007 in MEDLINE and the Cochrane Library. We identified relevant abstracts by using key words, retrieved full text articles, and stratified the resulting evidence according to systems used in established evidence-based models. We updated prior evidence-based best practice recommendations based upon interim literature.

Anesthesia for cesarean section in a patient with placenta previa and methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency.

We describe the anesthetic management of a patient with placenta previa presenting for a cesarean section, who had methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) deficiency. Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency increases homocysteine levels in the body and, therefore, predisposes to thrombosis. After a cerebrovascular accident at 8 weeks of gestational age, the patient received anticoagulants throughout the course of her pregnancy.