4. We recommend communicating to patients their perioperative cardiac risk

5. We recommend explicit communication of perioperative cardiac risk on the basis of the expected event rate among 100 patients or the range of risk consistent with the 95% confidence interval (CI) of the risk estimate (Strong Recommendation; Moderate-Quality Evidence).

An example of communicating perioperative cardiac risk quantitatively follows. “Ms Smith, if we had 100 patients with the same underlying conditions that you have who were to undergo the same type of surgery as you, we would expect 8 to 12 of these patients to suffer a heart attack, cardiac arrest, or die within the first 30 days after surgery. This also means we would expect 88 to 92 of these patients to go through surgery without one of these complications.”