Question 4 from the first paper of 2002 invites the candidates to discuss the perioperative management of a cardiac disease patient undergoing non-cardiac surgery. The college model answer to this 2002 question refers to the "recently published" ACC/AHA guidelines. The 2014 reiteration of these guidelines is now available, which is a massive 50 page document. The anaesthetic trainee will be abundantly familiar with these guidelines. For them, it must be bread and butter, luxuriously coated in the warmth of cuddly risk avoidance. For the intensivist however, anything reminiscent of anaesthetic preadmission clinics and preoperative risk assessments will be met with a mixture of revulsion and despair. In that spirit, the answer to Question 4 has been offered here in as brief a form as possible.
Preoperative assessment
Preoperative management
Intraoperative management
Postoperative management
The college, in their 2002 model answer, recommended the use of perioperative beta-blockers to reduce the mortality and risk of MI in these patients. Unfortunately, they recommended this on the basis of some work by Don Polderman, which was discredted after he was fired from his academic position for widespread fraud. Later systematic reviews (eg. Wijeysundera et al, 2014), after performing pre- and post-fraud analysis, determined that beta-blockers actual"y increased perioperative mortality after Polderman's work was excluded from the data set. "Perioperative beta blockade started within 1 day or less before noncardiac surgery prevents nonfatal MI but increases risks of stroke, death, hypotension, and bradycardia" they somberly concluded. As such, the current guidelines do not recommend preoperative beta blockade.
Fleisher, Lee A., et al. "2014 ACC/AHA guideline on perioperative cardiovascular evaluation and management of patients undergoing noncardiac surgery: executive summary: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines." Journal of the American College of cardiology 64.22 (2014): 2373-2405.
Wijeysundera, Duminda N., et al. "Perioperative beta blockade in noncardiac surgery: a systematic review for the 2014 ACC/AHA guideline on perioperative cardiovascular evaluation and management of patients undergoing noncardiac surgery: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on practice guidelines." Circulation 130.24 (2014): 2246-2264.