Adding increased glucose monitoring can optimize perioperative care of diabetic patients

A study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2012™ annual meeting revealed that adding increased glucose monitoring throughout surgical procedures will allow anesthesiologists to optimize the perioperative and surgical care of millions of diabetic patients throughout the world.

Approximately 17.5 million people in the U.S. have diabetes. These patients are known to have a higher likelihood of undergoing major surgeries than non-diabetic patients, have a higher risk of adverse events during surgery and a 30 to 50 percent longer stay in the hospital post-surgery.

In a recent survey of 269 hospitals across the U.S., one third of respondents indicated they had no metric to track the quality of inpatient diabetes care. Unfortunately, the optimal strategy to manage blood sugar in diabetic patients undergoing surgery is still up for debate, and this study establishes that increased vigilance through perioperative monitoring provides clinicians an important method for greatly improving care for this significant patient population.

"Avoiding extremes in blood glucose values, especially hypoglycemia or low blood sugar, is imperative to ensuring the safety of diabetic patients during surgery," said study author Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, M.D., M.P.H., Department of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tenn. "This is particularly important for surgical patients because the clinical signs of hypoglycemia can be masked by general anesthesia while patients are unable to communicate with their physicians."