Bertaggia L, et al. - Given that, thousands of lives may be saved via small improvements in peri-operative care but clinicians require confidence in the robustness of trial findings, and the Fragility Index could complement frequentist analysis and offer quantitative evaluation of robustness, researchers analyzed 46 peri-operative critical care randomised controlled trials describing a statistically significant variation in death (n=37,347). These studies were identified from MEDLINE. They found that the Fragility Index was strongly and positively correlated with: the number of participants; the number of centres that recruited participants; the number of nations that recruited participants; and the number of deaths. In individual randomised controlled trials, no robust impact of peri-operative interventions on mortality was evident as measured by the Fragility Index.