Publisher's Synopsis
The present text showed that the incidence of difficult intubations during the study period was within the indicated ranges, with a slight predominance of female sex and age over 60 years. No relational association between difficult airway and presence of associated pathologies was determined. The effectiveness of the Mallampati, mandibular protrusion, thyromental distance, interincisive distance and Cormack-Lehane tests as predictors of difficult intubation was demonstrated by their significant association with the intubation result, showing high specificity and adequate sensitivity in most of them, obtaining high negative predictive values and maximum positive predictive values for interincisive distance and Cormack-Lehane. According to the selected diagnostic test evaluation indicators, the most effective predictive tests were Cormack-Lehane, mandibular protrusion and thyromental distance, in that order.
