Study limitations
myocardial and renal protection, TAVI
This study has some limitations. First, it was a single-center trial with limited number of included patients, and was only powered for one surrogate cardiac biomarker, hs-cTnI. To evaluate the effects of deteriorated power and bias on study data, we performed sensitivity analysis by using bootstrap inference for multiple imputation in the intention-to-treat dataset. Although we observed a trend toward reduced hs-cTnI release and better postprocedural kidney recovery, we cannot definitely conclude that arterial oxygenation is beneficial for patients undergoing TAVI in terms of periprocedural myocardial and renal protection. Second, we included patients undergoing general anesthesia for transfemoral TAVI in this study. However, many patients undergo TAVI under conscious sedation or even local anesthesia, unless they are at very high periprocedural risk due to severely compromised cardiopulmonary function or the inability to maintain a stable supine position, for example. Although conscious sedation is increasingly provided to patients undergoing transfemoral TAVI than general anesthesia [