Deliberately Lowering Blood Pressure with Sodium Nitroprusside

The goal of hyptensive anesthesia is the safe reduction of intraoperative blood loss, thus reducing transfusion risks.  Previous hypotensive technics had a narrow margin of safety in that cardiac output was usually reduced in proportion to the degree of induced hypotension. This is in contrast to the results of our study, in which Sodium Nitroprusside was used as the sole hypotensive agent. Nitroprusside, a potent direct odilator,  reduces the afterload on the anesthesia depressed heart. The improvement in cardiac output plus better tissue perfusion appears to widen the margin of safety over that of earlier tech-nics.