Do we need other guidelines?

Michal Horacek

Our space came into existence by the Big Bang, a huge explosion of the
singularity. Nowadays we are living in the middle of the second explosion,
explosion of information and guidelines. During our professional lives we
are looking for information all the time and the ability to find information quickly and efficiently and to process it correctly is highly appreciated.
Guidelines are a form of already preprocessed information.
There are clinical practice guidelines on different issues everywhere.
More than 2000 medical guidelines (anaesthesiology 11, critical care medicine 3) are currently represented in the National Guidelines Clearinghouse
(www.guideline.gov), an American public resource for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. There are plenty of American guidelines concerning
anaesthesia and intensive/critical care medicine developed by different societies, respected are for instance American College of Cardiology / American
Heart Association (ACC/AHA) 2007 Guidelines on Perioperative Cardiovascular Evaluation and Care for Non-Cardiac Surgery (2) or AHA Guidelines for
Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (3). In
Europe there are four common European guidelines of the European Society
of Anaesthesiology (ESA) (e.g. Guidelines for safety and quality in anaesthesia practice in the European Union) (1); then exist guidelines developed by
individual national expert societies. Briefly, there is an inflation of guidelines.
The situation is even worse because there are not only clinical practice
guidelines but also other tools including clinical decision rules and clini Department of Anaesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, Division of Cardiac and
Vascular Anesthesia, Motol University Hospital and Department of Anaesthesiology
and Critical Care Medicine, Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education, Praha, Czech
Republic
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cal pathways grouped as evidence-based clinical algorithms (4). In addition,

different diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic scoring systems are often
applied, too. What to do not to get lost in this jungle? Moreover, do we really need other, totally new guidelines to add or do we need some common
European guidelines at all?
All these tools are products of evidence-based medicine (EBM). It is the
conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients (5). EBM is a continuous
ongoing process of accurately assessing and integrating the weight carried
by various levels of available evidence. This evidence comes especially from
randomized controlled trials (RCT) comparing outcome in exactly defined
groups of patients. Other sources of evidence include increasingly often
meta-analyses of RCTs but also weaker observational studies, case series
and expert opinions. EBM changes the way in which we decide from subjective decision making driven exclusively by individual experience to objective
decision making supported by available evidence. EBM should thus help us
provide efficient, safe and cost-effective care but should always be used
only in conjunction with personal clinical experience. It must be recognized
that available evidence is gained from populations but applied in individuals. Nowadays EBM is so widely accepted that some compare it to a new
ritual (6) or even to a religion (7).
How widely is EBM practised? In the internal medicine Michaud et al.
found in 1990s that > 60% of therapeutic clinical decisions were supported
by RCT evidence (8). Very similar situation could exist in cardiology, known
for the highest number of randomized trials and guidelines arising from them
(e.g. there are 349 guidelines regarding cardiovascular diseases in National
Guidelines Clearinghouse). In anaesthesiology and intensive care medicine,
however, there are much fewer guidelines because evidence from RCT is
frequently lacking due to many reasons. To name only a few: heterogeneous
populations, life-saving interventions making randomization difficult, rare
events. Therefore decisions are based mostly on thorough knowledge of the
science and on the clinical sense.
Practising good anaesthesia is a science, skill and art. Becoming an anaesthesiologist requires reading through several meters of books in pregraduate as well as in postgraduate education as can be documented by the Reading list recommended for candidates preparing for the European Diploma in
Anaesthesia (9). Such a comprehensive education predominantly in pathophysiology and relevant pharmacology together with knowledge of pathological conditions should allow to the anaesthesiologist to reach correct
decisions in most cases. Each anaesthesiologist must also master necessary
Actualitati in anestezie, terapie intensiva si medicina de urgenta

skills, e.g. airways management, invasive monitoring or regional blocks. For

mastering these skills the anaesthesiologist needs instructions, i.e. step-bystep descriptions how to do it. The art of anaesthesia resides in the person
of the anaesthesiologist who should be friendly, cooperative but assertive,
really a good spirit of the operating theatre, with sound clinical sense for
the patient. Does such a highly educated and skilful expert really need clinical practice guidelines?
I am convinced the answer is yes because clinical practice guidelines can
really help him make qualified decisions in defined clinical situations. In my
opinion, the main reason for guidelines is that in the middle of information
explosion nobody can master the whole specialty he works at and more to
keep his knowledge updated all the time. For instance, in PubMed there are
75 anaesthesiological journals indexed (10) (22 with impact factor in Journal Citation Reports) (11). Nobody can read through such a huge amount
of pages. This high number of publications documents that current knowledge in the field is extremely comprehensive. In addition, it is necessary to
follow not only the main area of interest but also the progress in related
fields relevant for anaesthesiology, such as specific topics in pharmacology,
cardiology, surgery or blood coagulation, because current clinical problems
are extremely interconnected.
This requirement to follow a wide area of research is possible to document
for instance at the problem of perioperative management of patients with
stents implanted into the coronary arteries. The decision making in these
patients is quite challenging because there are many factors in the play
including the type of the stent, time ellapsed since implantation, antiplatelet therapy, risk of bleeding vs. risk of thrombosis, comorbidities and their
therapy. Incorrect decisions can have fatal consequences. In contrary to
the intuition it was demonstrated that surgery performed soon after stent
implantation can have catastrophic outcome as well as premature discontinuation of dual antiplatelet therapy (12). Nobody, who is not particularly
interested in such a vast area of problems associated with stents, can follow
the progress in this field. Anaesthesiologist not involved in the management of these patients has therefore frequently not enough knowledge for
a qualified decision making. Thus, guidelines recommending management
of such patients could be useful. However, due to the rapid development of
interventional cardiology and associated pharmacotherapy they must accordingly be adjusted at short intervals. Consequently, it is vital to identify
all other areas where clinical practice guidelines are urgently needed, i.e. areas where either uncertainty regarding the correct approach or unreasoned
outcome affecting variability exists.
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Clinical practice guidelines are systematically developed statements that

aim to help physicians and patients reach the best health care decisions
(13). Guidelines should be clear, unequivocal, valid, reliable and applicable.
They are based on systematic reviews of existing knowledge and recommend
what should and should not be done in specific clinical situation. They can
help to standardize care and improve health outcomes as well as outcome
assessment. However, there are many inherent problems some of which are
discussed.
The development of guidelines is mostly a long-term and expensive process. Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN), an organization
aiming to improve the quality of health care for patients in Scotland, sets
the proper time necessary for particular guideline development as long as 30
months (14). It is obvious such guidelines may be precisely polished but need
not reflect the most recent knowledge given the current rate of progress in
medicine. On the other side, some argue that in spite of the long preparation
the quality of guidelines is not high enough. More so, some even state the
quality of guidelines is declining. Regarding high cost of guidelines development and implementation they are worth only for specific diagnostic and
treatment modalities, which can be expensive or which can substantially
affect patients fate, to justify the resources invested.
Other important question is the volume of guidelines which can be either
too general if they are short or in opposite case they can restrict the care
in an unduly manner. Authors of the guidelines usually aim to specify precisely when and how they can be applied. This approach, however, makes
guidelines progressively more and more comprehensive. This can nicely be
documented on the AHA guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Each
newer version is bigger. The first standards and guidelines, already published
by AHA in 1974, had 31 pages (15), the following ones in 1980 - 56 pages
(16), in 1986 - altogether 87 pages (17), in 1992 - 127 pages (18), in 2000
- 384 pages (19), the latest issue in 2005 - 211 pages (3). However, most
people do not like to study thoroughly such thick publications dedicated to
the relatively narrow topic. Thus, it may be expected such guidelines can be
understood in a distorted way and not followed appropriately.
The fact that people do not read guidelines thoroughly is seen with betablocker administration recommended in ACC/AHA 2007 Guidelines on perioperative cardiovascular evaluation and care for noncardiac surgery (3).
According to these Guidelines beta-blockers should be continued in patients undergoing surgery who are already receiving them; or beta-blockers
should be given to patients at high cardiac risk owing to the finding of
ischemia on preoperative testing who are undergoing vascular surgery (both
Actualitati in anestezie, terapie intensiva si medicina de urgenta

indications are of class I, i.e. treatment is beneficial, useful and effective).

However, many anaesthesiologists believe beta-blockers should be given to
all patients at risk of cardiac complications (!) undergoing non-cardiac surgery. Perhaps it could be caused by inclusion of perioperative beta-blocker
therapy into the set of quality-of-care measures used for instance by the
National Quality Forum, an organization evaluating a quality of delivered
health care in USA (20). Each diagnostic or treatment strategy may be used
as a measure of quality only in the case when its indication is of class I (definitely indicated) or of class III (definitely contraindicated) that is not valid
for routine beta-blocker administration.
Ambiguity surrounding beta-blocker administration in perioperative setting documents that clinical practice guidelines in anaesthesia and intensive
care are often based on relatively weak evidence. This can be illustrated on
the set of 46 recommendations made by 44 critical care and infectious disease experts representing 11 international organizations in Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines for management of severe sepsis and septic shock
(21). Majority of these recommendations (27, i.e. almost 60%) are suggested
with strength of grade E, i.e. evidence is supported at the best by non-randomized trials, studies with historical control group, case series or expert
opinion, while only 5 recommendations are of grade A, i.e. their evidence is
supported by large, randomized trials with clearcut results (21).
Clinical practice guidelines are always only as good as their implementation into everyday clinical practice. They should not be in contradiction with
personal experience because this can substantially delay desired change of
clinical practice. It is necessary to identify barriers to implementation and to
study how to overcome them. The implementation requires time as well as
financial costs and need to be controlled and evaluated.
Finally, the last important issue associated with guidelines to be mentioned here is a legal problem. Clinical practice guidelines are not the same
as standards of care. Guidelines recommend what should and should not be
done in specific clinical situations while standards of care describe how an
average, prudent provider in a given community would manage the patient
under the same or similar circumstances (22).
To summarize, clinical practice guidelines can be useful in situations in
which a sufficiently educated anaesthesiologist does not have enough good
information to make a qualified decision for the particular patient. These
gaps of knowledge should be identified and relevant clinical practice guidelines developed. It will be the task of the ESA Permanent Task Force for Clinical Practice Guidelines suggested by the Focus Group on Guidelines constituted from the elected national representatives of personal ESA members in
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individual European countries, who were interested in this area. In advance,

through the cooperation of particular national societies a database of potentially useful already existing national guidelines similar to the National
Guidelines Clearinghouse will be set up on the platform of the ESA.
In conclusion: The art of medicine is the ability to integrate, adjust and
individualize knowledge and to apply the available evidence at the bedside. (Gordon D. Rubenfeld of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care
Medicine, Harborview Medical Center, University of Washington, Seattle,
Washington, USA) (23). However, personal clinical experience, principles of
physiology, understanding of patients values, and expert opinion should not
be ostracized from the physicianss armamentarium. (John J. Marini of the
Department of Medicine, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA)
(23). Only together these approaches form the knowledge-based medicine
(24).

References
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Noncardiac Surgery. J Am Coll Cardiol, 2007; 50:159-241
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