Why You Should Stop Smoking Before Going For Surgery?

Modern anaesthetics are extremely safe. New drugs, modern monitors and well-trained anesthetists make anaesthesia safer all the time. For healthy people anaesthesia is so safe that it is difficult to measure the degree of risk any more. People with heart, lung or other diseases, obviously, have an increased risk. Smoking whether active or passive puts the patient at increased risk whenever he undergoes surgery and anaesthesia with higher incidence of perioperative complications and unplanned ICU admission .In the short term it causes physiological changes in the body, which is attributed to both nicotine and carbon monoxide. While in the long term it does so by doubling or even trippling the incidence of major heart and lung diseases. In this article I am going to stress on facts about smoking and anaesthesia concluding that stop smoking even for short term preoperatively can reduce the risks and the incidence of perioperative complications.