Clinical application of the cardioprotective effects of volatile anaesthetics: CON--total intravenous anaesthesia or not total intravenous anaesthesia to anaesthetise a cardiac patient?

Although volatile anaesthetics show strong and easily reproducible cardioprotective effects in animal experiments, these effects are less obvious in clinical settings. Indeed, more than a decade after the first human clinical study, the number of publications has increased extensively, but the encouraging results from previous studies in terms of myocardial protection have failed to translate into an improvement in survival or a decrease the incidence of myocardial infarction. No consensus on the modalities of administration of volatile anaesthetics has been agreed and when the experimental protocols are transposed into daily clinical practice, their cardioprotective effects are still weak. The reasons for the disparities between experimental and clinical studies will be reviewed here, especially the role of patients' co-morbidities and medications as well as the limitations of the main positive clinical trials. Recent data showing anti-inflammatory properties of propofol will also be explained. One of the most important clinical benefits of propofol is that it can be used by target-controlled or continuous infusion for anaesthesia and sedation throughout the surgical and critical care periods without the risk of a transition failure. Further large multi-centre clinical investigations are still required.