Editorial [New and Old Drugs in Perioperative Medicine - Part-I]

We are very pleased to introduce this Current Drug Targets issue titled “New and old drugs in Perioperative Medicine”. When we first had the idea of this issue, we started from the consideration that Perioperative Medicine is characterized by a particularly high degree of innovation. In last years, many important novelties about drug therapy have been introduced. In particular, some relatively new drugs and many old drugs have gained new indications in the perioperative period in order to improve anesthesia and analgesia, or to prevent or treat perioperative complications. Colimicine is one example among many; this drug, which was indeed nearly obsolete few years ago, is now largely utilized to treat multi-drug resistant infections. Since its theme is perioperative medicine, the issue includes many topics, which go from anesthesia to postoperative intensive care. Some reviews, on anesthetic adjuvants for fast track surgery and on dexmedetomidine intraoperative utilization, deal with anesthesia. Others, on gabapentanoids, ketamine, magnesium sulphate perioperative utilization and on new drugs for epidural analgesia, mainly concern postoperative analgesia. Analgosedation and clonidine infusion are two recent developments in sedation techniques and are both the subject of a review. In last years many compounds have been utilized to prevent postoperative complications; they include statins, betablockers, levosimendan, alogenated inhalatory anesthetics, immunonutrients. Evidences on their effectiveness and current indications are examined in some of the reviews included in this issue. Finally, some topics on sepsis have also been included, such as the utilization of antioxidants and corticosteroids, or the choice among antipyretic drugs. In the end, we would like to thank all the Authors that joined us in the preparation of this issue and devoted their time and efforts to produce exhaustive up-to-date contributions that, we sincerely hope, could be valuable for readers' clinical practice.