Nov. 28, 2007 -- Anesthesiologists today reported that "anesthesia awareness" -- being conscious during surgery -- affects less than 1% of U.S. patients given general anesthesia.

Doctors addressed the topic in a live webcast from New York, spurred by Friday's release of the movie Awake, a fictional thriller based on anesthesia awareness, also called unintended intraoperative awareness.

There have been "a lot of different studies" trying to pinpoint the incidence of anesthesia awareness, Marc Bloom, MD, PhD, of New York University Medical Center, told reporters.

Several studies put the incidence of anesthesia awareness at 0.1% of all general anesthesia patients. That works out to be about 21,000 of the 21 million people in the U.S. who get general anesthesia in a typical year.

But if high-risk patients aren't included, the numbers drop to about one in 40,000 patients, Bloom says.

"But let's get out of this box of how often it occurs. Really, one case is too many," says Orin Guidry, MD, of the Medical University of South Carolina.

"As anesthesiologists, we are not going to stop until we can get that risk down to zero," says Guidry, who is a past president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA).

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