With today's improving treatment of patients with cardiac disease, questions regarding noncardiac surgery in these patients have become more frequent and more complex. These questions are well defined and thoroughly addressed in this book by Dr Glasser and colleagues.
The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with physiologic responses to anesthesia and surgery, the second addresses preoperative clinical and laboratory evaluation of the patient's cardiovascular status, and the third is devoted to principles of treatment during the perioperative period. The individual chapters are dedicated to specific topics (eg, exercise testing, echocardiography, arrhythmias, etc) and are concise and relevant. There is some overlap and redundancy, inevitable in a book of this type, though editing and slightly different approaches to the same data keep this problem from becoming burdensome.
The strength of this book lies not only in its wealth of information, but also in its underlying commitment to