Perioperative Patients Anxiety

Introduction: The surgical procedure is for patients an experience that is accompanied by an emotional stress. Stress is experienced as a vague feeling of fear, tension, anxiety, sadness and anger, which is accompanied by clinical manifestations such as tachycardia, arrhythmia, etc. Aim: This literature review was aimed to analyze how perioperative anxiety has been studied in Greek and international literature and what strategies have been developed to address it. Methods: The literature of the last 20 years has been searched within data bases such as PubMed, Cinahl, Science Direct, Wiley Online Library, and Google Scholar using the combination of keywords. From a multitude of bibliographic data were selected 48 suitable studies were included in this study classified by themes. Results: Patients who have high levels of preoperative anxiety have more problems post-operatively. The increased preoperative patients anxiety was associated with various factors such as: the expected postoperative pain, separation from family, loss of independence, the type of disease, the degree of life-threatening patient disease, fear of anesthesia and surgery as well as fear of death. Increased postoperative anxiety was also associated with various factors such as the overall experience and the intensity of the pain, the existing minor psychiatric disorders, preoperative occasional stress, and negative preoperative self-concept of the future, history of smoking and poor physical condition. Conclusion: Early recognition of preoperative anxiety is necessary in terms of implementation of appropriate interventions to reduce anxiety within the preoperative preparation of patients.