Dubious effects by the choice of anesthetics in remote ischemic preconditioning

Initial clinical studies of remote ischemic preconditioning (RIPC) led to encouraging proof-of-principle, while others did not. Possible explanations for the divergent results are that (I) most trials used only surrogate end points; (II) were conducted as single center studies; (III) used a single-blind design; (IV) and/or had a small sample size. The RIPHeart (1) and ERICCA (2) trials are encompassing more than 3,000 patients and provide now new evidence on this topic.