In patients undergoing non-cardiac surgery who are at high risk for coronary artery disease, prophylactic treatment with clonidine significantly reduces the incidence of myocardial ischaemia and death.
“We were able to reduce mortality by 50 percent with this new class of [alpha-blocker] agent,” said Dr. Arthur W. Wallace, from the department of anaesthesiology and perioperative medicine at University of California, in San Francisco, California, United States.
“I think this will come as a surprise to many physicians,” he told Doctor’s Guide. According to Dr. Wallace and colleagues, perioperative myocardial ischaemia occurs in 20 to 40 percent of patients at risk for cardiac morbidity and is associated with a nine-fold increase in risk of cardiac morbidity.
For their study, presented here October 16 at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), Dr. Wallace and colleagues randomised 190 patients who were diagnosed with — or were at risk for — coronary artery disease to receive clonidine (n=125) or placebo (n=65).
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