Working under bright lights and wearing heavy gowns can make surgery uncomfortably hot for doctors and nurses. Operating rooms, therefore, are traditionally kept quite cold. That makes the surgical patient quite cold, too--even slightly hypothermic. Body temperatures can drop by 4 degrees. Doctors used to think mild hypothermia was actually good for the patient because cold retards the growth of bacteria in the air. But according to a new study, the cold temperatures in operating rooms actually triple the risk of infection.
What causes wound infection is not really bacteria floating around in the air but the patient’s decreased resistance to bacteria on the skin or inside the body, says Daniel Sessler, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Vienna. To find out how operating-room temperatures affect that resistance, Sessler and his colleagues studied 200 patients undergoing colorectal surgery. In 104 patients, warmed ...
