"People have always been afraid of general anesthesia. Many fear they won’t wake up from this “artificial sleep” — actually more of a coma, albeit drug-induced and reversible. In the 1940s, for every one million patients operated on under full anesthesia, 640 died. By the end of the 1980s, fatalities were down to four per every million, thanks to modern safety standards and better medical training. However, a recent article published in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the German Medical Association’s official international science journal, shows that after decades of decline, the worldwide death rate during full anesthesia is back on the rise, to about seven patients in every million. And the number of deaths within a year after a general anesthesia is frighteningly high: one in 20. In the over-65 age group, it’s one in 10."
And probably most of those are dead from their illness, complications here of, or some other illness. You can't tell me that there are even trace amounts of the drugs used in the body 1 month after general anesthesia, much less 12.
It is one of the most "technically true" facts I have ever seen.
These numbers carry a very high selection bias. At age you generally operate people who are already sick and about to die anyways. I don't know if we even have data to correct them for that to calculate the "Death rate of healthy people after anaesthesia" vs. "Death rate of healthy people of the same age group."
It's worth noting that their data contains zero observed deaths in ASA Physical Status I Patients, which are basically healthy adults.
I would assume things have either stayed the same or improved: Sevoflurane was just starting to be used around the time that the data were taken for that paper.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/04/under-the-knife-study-...
"People have always been afraid of general anesthesia. Many fear they won’t wake up from this “artificial sleep” — actually more of a coma, albeit drug-induced and reversible. In the 1940s, for every one million patients operated on under full anesthesia, 640 died. By the end of the 1980s, fatalities were down to four per every million, thanks to modern safety standards and better medical training. However, a recent article published in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the German Medical Association’s official international science journal, shows that after decades of decline, the worldwide death rate during full anesthesia is back on the rise, to about seven patients in every million. And the number of deaths within a year after a general anesthesia is frighteningly high: one in 20. In the over-65 age group, it’s one in 10."