Preface on highlights in anesthesia and critical care medicine

Modern medicine would not be possible without anesthesia. An early form of anesthesia was used for the first time at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1846 (1). Since then, anesthesia and associated critical care medicine have advanced and evolved. Anesthesiologists have become specialized and created countless subspecialties in the field of anesthesiology. This highlights the huge variety of clinical conditions an anesthesiologist will be exposed to during his career (2).

Moreover, anesthesiology holds a unique position in medicine as it intersects with nearly every medical specialty, facilitating medicine’s most complex interventional procedures. This exposure to diverse clinical approaches and operative pathologies makes anesthesiology a birthplace of physician scientists (3).

In the current series, we highlight what physician scientists in the field of anesthesia and critical care medicine have created in the most recent years.

We present updates on anesthesia during lung transplantation, new frontiers in neuromonitoring, state of the art knowledge how to prevent residual neuromuscular blockade and translational research in female health anesthesiology.

Further we delve into new avenues in the field of critical care medicine. Here we discuss a circadian mega bundle for the critical ill (4), the future of an anesthesia guided cardiac critical care unit (5), the use of thoracic ultrasound in acute respiratory distress syndrome (6), and we present updates on antibiotic therapy in critical care medicine.

Acknowledgments

Funding: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institute of Aging of the National Institutes of Health (No. R56HL156955). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Annals of Translational Medicine for the series “Highlights in Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine”. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: Both authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://atm.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/atm-2023-19/coif). The series “Highlights in Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. T.E. served as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series and serves as an unpaid editorial board member of Annals of Translational Medicine from November 2021 to October 2023. B.S. served as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series. The authors have no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

References

1. Robinson DH, Toledo AH. Historical development of modern anesthesia. J Invest Surg 2012;25:141-9. [Crossref] [PubMed]
2. Sood J, Bhatia P, Johnson JE, et al. Career as a general speciality anaesthesiologist. Indian J Anaesth 2021;65:6-11. [Crossref] [PubMed]
3. Castellanos JG, Perez AR, Perez RK. Anaesthesiologists as translational scientists. Br J Anaesth 2020; [Crossref]
4. Prin M, Bertazzo J, Walker LA, et al. Enhancing circadian rhythms-the circadian MEGA bundle as novel approach to treat critical illness. Ann Transl Med 2023;11:319. [Crossref] [PubMed]
5. Tankard K, Shelton K. The future of cardiac critical care: an anesthesia perspective. Ann Transl Med 2023;11:324. [Crossref] [PubMed]
6. García-de-Acilu M, Santafé M, Roca O. Use of thoracic ultrasound in acute respiratory distress syndrome. Ann Transl Med 2023;11:320. [Crossref] [PubMed]

Tobias Eckle

Benjamin Scott