From Michael Moneypenny
I enjoyed reading Helen Phillips’s article describing how “animal studies and test tube experiments” suggest that some anaesthetics may increase the risk of an elderly person developing Alzheimer’s disease (28 October, p 12). But Phillips could have balanced the story with population-based data showing no increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s from the use of general anaesthetics: for example, the studies by Nicolaas Bohnen and colleagues.
She states that “anaesthetists need to log more carefully the combinations and doses of the anaesthetic they give to patients…” But anaesthetists in the UK fill out a chart for every anaesthetic that they administer and on this they document exactly how much of the intravenous anaesthetic they have given, as well as the percentage of inhaled anaesthetic they administered. How could we log this “more carefully”?
Upton, Wirral, UK
