Innovative virtual reality (VR) technologies hold promise in reducing children’s anxiety and pain before and after medical procedures and surgery, suggest two studies that were presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2018 annual meeting.
The first successful surgery under anaesthesia occurred in the 1840s. Since then—more than 170 years later—people have been developing theories about what might be going on in the brain while a person is unconscious. And many mysteries remain. Despite thousands of surgeries taking place each day in the United States, researchers still don’t understand exactly which specific areas of the…
Point-of-care ultrasound is playing an important role in the anaesthesiology department at Spain’s Hospital Clinic of Barcelona. Dr Xavier Sala-Blanch, Senior Doctor and Head of Section in the hospital’s Department of Anaesthesiology and Resuscitation and Associate Professor of Anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Barcelona, discussed how the use of ultrasound technology…
Technical innovations and the implementation of quality standards in anaesthesia have immensely increased patient safety. ‘Over the past 60 years, patient safety during anaesthesia has improved more than in any other medical discipline,’ according to Professor Achim von Goedecke MD MSc, Director of the Institute of Anaesthesiology and Critical Care at Landeskrankenhaus Steyr in Upper Austria.…
Saturday the 27th of January 2018 marks the first ESRA European Day of Regional Anaesthesia, delivered simultaneously in over 20 training hubs across the continent. FUJIFILM SonoSite is delighted to be backing this new initiative by providing point-of-care ultrasound devices to many of the workshops. Dr Jonathan Womack, an anaesthetic consultant at the Royal Victoria Infirmary (RVI), Newcastle,…
Caffeine helps quickly boost wakefulness following general anesthesia, a new study finds. The stimulant—used daily by more than 90 percent of adults in the U.S.—appears to alter physiological function in two different ways to shorten recovery time.
Anaesthetists working in perioperative medicine have increasingly taken a whole body approach to patient evaluation known as TUBE – Total Ultrasound Body Examination – thanks to the development of point-of-care ultrasound. Dr Christophe Aveline, Consultant Anaesthetist in critical care and surgery at the Sévigné Private hospital in Rennes, is an advocate of TUBE and works closely on its…
Children with cancer could be spared dozens of doses of general anaesthesia by projecting a video directly on to the inside of a radiotherapy machine during treatment, according to research presented at the ESTRO 36 conference.
Dr. Thomas Grau, Head of Anaesthesia, Surgery, Intensive Care, Emergency Medicine and Pain at the Gütersloh Clinic, first studied ultrasound for a PhD on spinal imaging at Heidelberg University Hospital in the 1990s. 25 years on, he reflects on the role point-of-care ultrasound now plays in anaesthesia.
Mechanical ventilation and subspecialisation are key aspects of modern anaesthesia and critical care practice according to Dr Javier Garcia Fernandez, Head of Critical Care and Anaesthesiology at University Hospital Puerta de Hierro in Madrid.
As the Ebola virus disease pandemic unfolded in 2014, it may have seemed like a sudden and unprecedented event. But the disease has a long history, the epidemic is ongoing, and new outbreaks are certain to occur in the future, reports the September issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia.
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the Institute for Health Research of the Hospital "Ramón y Cajal" (IRYCIS have patented a new device for performing skin biopsies. With this new tool a skin biopsy can be performed with fewer instruments and the length of the procedure is shortened from thirty minutes to less than five.
Although sedatives are often administered before surgery, a randomized trial finds that among patients undergoing elective surgery under general anesthesia, receiving the sedative lorazepam before surgery, compared with placebo or no premedication, did not improve the self-reported patient experience the day after surgery, but was associated with longer time till removal off a breathing tube…
A hospital with a reputation for trailblazing heart surgery has taken transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) onto the next step in the UK.
Many physiological and observational studies indicate that non-invasive ventilation (NIV) after both thoracic and abdominal surgery is helpful and non-randomised trials have indeed confirmed the benefits.
In intensive care units (ICUs) little can be automated to relieve staff pressures – with the exception of point of care testing (POCT)
A UK study has highlighted the issue of patients waking up from a general anaesthetic while undergoing surgery. The research, which questioned more than 7,100 consultant anaesthetists, revealed that there was about one episode of accidental awareness in every 15,000 general anaesthetics cases in the three million UK operations in 2011.
Massive and increasing cost pressure urges many hospitals to look for alternatives to expensive in-patient surgery.
Belgium – Last year, the annual ISICEM event attracted almost 6,000 participants from 101 countries. Its chairman, Professor Jean-Louis Vincent, from the Intensive Care Medicine Department in Erasme University Hospital, Brussels, offered EH a few reasons for its continuing success.
Can an anaesthetist treat a patient with heart failure (HF) without any specialist knowledge of cardiology? That was the question posed by Dr Florian Weis, from the Clinic of Anaesthesiology at the University Hospital of the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, when lecturing on perioperative management of this patient group.
Leveraging more than 100 years of anaesthesia expertise, GE Healthcare introduces ecoFLOW technology option to help guide clinicians in agent delivery, while providing economic and environmental benefits.
Ensuring the safety of hospitalised patients is vital – and brought under a particularly strong focus in anaesthesiology. Launched in 2010, the Helsinki Declaration provided a further boost. Report: Holger Zorn
Volume-targeted ventilated premature babies have a higher survival rate and suffer less ventilation-related lung damage – this is the result of a survey amongst international neonatologists.