EDITORIALS Anti-inflammatory effects of perioperative statin therapy

Perioperative physicians seek to reduce the risk of adverse perioperative events, focusing in particular on adverse cardiovascular events such as myocardial infarction (MI) and cardiac death. To this aim, extensive and often invasive intra- and postoperative hemodynamic monitoring have become the standard of care. Obviously, monitoring in itself does not prevent adverse events as over 5 % of high-risk surgical patients still suffer from perioperative myo-cardial ischemia and infarction.1,2 Therefore, efforts have been undertaken to reduce the risk of perioperative MI by risk stratification during preoperative assessment and sub-sequent initiation of preventive medical treatment early before surgery in patients identified as high-risk.3 Pre-ventive medical treatments that have been investigated include preoperative initiation of beta-blockers, alpha2