RESUMO
INTRODUCTION: Due to the lack of data in our medium and epidemiologic study was performed with the aims of knowing the numbers of morbimortality of anesthesia in a tertiary hospital as well as identify the risk factors of the same. METHODS: A general prospective study was carried out with a sample of 5,162 anesthesias administered in our hospital from October 1986 to October 1987. The questionnaires undertaken were completed by the anesthesiologists of the hospital staff. Age, sex, ASA, emergency, associated preoperative pathologies, premedication, length of operation, duration fo anesthesia, anesthesiologist experience, type of surgery, type of anesthesia, monitoring, type of complications and evolution of the same were the variables assessed. Severe cases were also evaluated by 3 anesthesiologists of the department, independent of those involved. The relative risk and the confidence interval of 95% were calculated as were the chi of Mantel-Haenszel tendency and a test of mean comparisons. RESULTS: The mortality partially linked to anesthesia found was 1:2,581. The numbers of morbidity were of 0.77% for severe complications and 14.1% for the slight complications. Upon analysis of severe complications 28.5% of the cases were found to be due to human error. The principal risk factors were age, emergency, bad preoperative physical state, lenght of operation, type of anesthesia and surgery. CONCLUSIONS: The situation in our center does not differ from that found by other authors and not only the numbers of morbimortality but also the factors of risk found in this study are similar to those published in recent studies.