Anesthesia related death during plastic surgery

From the Palm Beach Post comes the tragic death of Florida teen, Stephanie Kuleba, from a rare allergic reaction to inhalation anesthetics called malignant hyperthermia (MH). Wikipedia describes it succinctly as a idiosyncratic reaction that “induces a drastic and uncontrolled increase in skeletal muscle oxidative metabolism which overwhelms the body’s capacity to supply oxygen, remove carbon dioxide, and regulate body temperature, eventually leading to circulatory collapse and death if untreated.”

There’s really no way to screen for this process and a patient can die quickly. Most surgeons and anesthesiologists may go their entire career and never see a true case of it. I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day about office based surgery and he said he was unlikely to return to doing that after seen a near fatal MH on a cosmetic surgery case he was doing in an ambulatory surgery center adjacent to a hospital.

I’m not sure what the take home message from this is. It’s such a rare event that it’s hard to justify having exotic protocols at all times in low risk procedures. Most office surgery suites maintain a supply of Dantrolene, a medicine to treat MH which is almost $2500 per dose and must be restocked often to stay current. There’s plenty of adverse events more common then MH, but we don’t have aortic balloon pumps or cardiac bypass machines routinely laying around for that. It already sounds like that the family has hired an attorney who is already assuming an aggressive posture in his comments to the media so I’m sure we’ll see some legal proceedings even if perfect care for MH was instituted.