Obesity and anesthesia. An approach to the ongoing challenge

Obesity is a chronic, multisystemic, pro-inflammatory and progressive disease, whose prevalence is increasing worldwide. It is also responsible for a significant share of global and premature deaths and weight-related diseases of different degrees of severity.

This condition causes a change in the demographic characteristics of patients undergoing surgical and anesthetic procedures.

Moreover, BMI alone appears to be insufficient to assess the risk of obesity-related morbidity and mortality.

All this, together with technical difficulties, pathophysiological changes and pharmacological peculiarities, leads to the need for acquiring specific knowledge and skills by the anesthesiologist, as it will be more and more frequent to deal with this type of patients on a daily basis.