The importance of body temperature: An anesthesiologist's perspective

The anesthesiologist is entrusted with many important responsibilities during the perioperative experience beyond anesthetizing the patient, including securing the airway, attenuating the stress response, ensuring the patient has a sustainable hemodynamics, implementing a ventilation strategy, preserving euvolemia, and maintaining normothermia. From an outsider's prospective, of all of these concerns one may think that maintaining normothermia would be the easiest of tasks, yet for a wide variety of reasons discussed below, intraoperative hypothermia (< 36°C) occurs frequently when the patients are under general anesthesia