The Impact of Intraoperative Hypothermia on Early Postoperative Adverse Events After Radical Esophagectomy for Cancer: A Retrospective Cohort Study

ObjectiveTo investigate the correlation between intraoperative body temperature and postoperative adverse effects in patients who underwent esophagectomy procedures.DesignRetrospective cohort study.SettingUniversity Hospital.ParticipantsOne hundred twenty-one patients undergoing esophagectomy were enrolled.InterventionsNone.Measurements and Main ResultsVarious perioperative and intraoperative variables were recorded. Hypothermia was defined as a urinary bladder temperature<35°C. Multiple logistic regression analysis was conducted to identify independent significant predictors of postoperative complications. In addition, the authors also determined a cutoff point for intraoperative minimum urinary bladder temperature by analyzing receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for occurrence of adverse events at 1 month after surgery. No patients died within 1 month after the surgery. There were 53 patients with early postoperative complications, and 51 had experienced intraoperative hypothermia. Factors that were correlated significantly with complications included age (p = 0.02); hypothermia (p<0.01); and doses of ephedrine (p<0.01), phenylephrine (p<0.01), and fentanyl (p<0.01). Multiple logistic regression analysis identified intraoperative hypothermia as a significant independent predictor for the development of early perioperative complications (odds ratio 2.57; 95% confidence interval 1.09-6.08). The area under the ROC curve for body temperature was 0.71, and the cutoff point was 35°C (sensitivity = 0.65, specificity = 0.72).ConclusionsIntraoperative hypothermia was identified as an independent risk factor for early postoperative adverse events following esophagectomy.