Chest
Clinical Investigations: SurgeryPreoperative Smoking Habits and Postoperative Pulmonary Complications
Section snippets
Design/Subjects
A prospective cohort study was conducted between 1990 and 1992 at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Syracuse, NY. Potential subjects were identified by systematic review of daily admission logs. Patients scheduled for elective general, orthopedic, urologic, or cardiovascular surgery were interviewed at the time of hospital admission. To be eligible, a potential subject must have been scheduled to receive general or spinal anesthesia. Patients scheduled to undergo ear, nose, throat,
Sample Charactenstics
Characteristics of the study participants are listed in Table 1. Current smokers comprised 34.4% (n=141) of the study population, 45.6% (n=187) were past smokers, and 20% (n=82) were never smokers. The vast majority of subjects were male and white. Current smokers were significantly younger than past or never smokers. They were also less likely to be married, had lower incomes, and lower BMI values when compared with both past and never smokers. As expected, current smokers achieved lower peak
DISCUSSION
We demonstrated that current smokers experienced significantly more postoperative pulmonary complications than past or never smokers. This finding is consistent with results from several other studies.8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 Wellman and Smith18 found that the incidence of postoperative pulmonary complications following upper abdominal and thoracic surgery was doubled in cigarette smokers, and that smoking ≥20 cigarettes per day was associated with a fourfold increase in postoperative
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