Less incidence of coronary artery disease in general anesthesia compared to spinal-epidural anesthesia after total knee replacement: 90-day follow-up period by a population-based dataset.

Total knee replacement (TKR) is an effective and safe procedure. However, large-scale study to compare the incidence of coronary artery disease (CAD) after spinal or epidural anesthesia (SA-EA) or general anesthesia (GA) for TKR has not ever been conducted. To do so, we studied a population-based dataset from the Taiwan National Health Research Institute and hypothesized that the incidence of CAD might be different with regional than with general anesthesia. The risk of CAD-related events during a 90-day follow-up period among patients who received TKR under SA-EA or GA was evaluated in the present study. A total of 1500 patients from the Taiwan National Health Insurance claims database who underwent TKR from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2006, were allocated into two groups. Group 1 included 1012 patients who received SA-EA during TKR procedure. Group 2 included 488 patients who received GA during this procedure. The number of patients who developed CAD during the 90-day follow-up period was 31 (3.1 %) in group 1 and 6 (1.2 %) in group 2. The Kaplan-Meier survival analysis of IHD-free cumulative survival rate during the 90-day follow-up period for patients who underwent TKR was significantly lower in group 1 than in group 2. The hazard ratio for the occurrence of CAD was 2.80 (95 % CI 1.16-6.78), and the hazard was higher for patients who received SA-EA than for patients who received GA after adjusted potential confounding factors. After the performance of TKR, patients had a potentially increased risk for CAD in SA-EA compared to GA during the 90-day follow-up period.