Keyword: anaesthesia

Postoperative pain

Hypnosis through virtual reality aids in medical recovery

Anesthesiologists at UT Southwestern Medical Center are helping to explore the use of hypnosis through virtual reality to lessen postoperative pain and anxiety in children.

Teamwork <3

7-Tesla: Multidisciplinary care is key to cardiac disease management

New 7-Tesla MR methods could potentially shed light on cardiomyopathies’ principles, according to a leading French radiologist who also stresses the importance of teamwork between radiologists, cardiologists, surgeons and anaesthesiologists. Morphologic and dynamic information of the myocardium is achieved with millimetric resolution (0.9x0.9 square mm). Strong intensity variations…

ANESTHESIOLOGY 2018

Virtual reality reduces children’s anxiety and pain

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 study found virtual reality hypnosis (VRH) reduced anxiety, total postoperative opioid consumption and vomiting in children after scoliosis surgery.…

Mysterious blackout

What happens when we lose consciousness during anaesthesia?

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…

Technology benefits

Driving regional anaesthesia forward with point-of-care ultrasound

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…

Rising up

Anaesthesia is a story of great success

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.…

Regional anaesthesia

SonoSite supports first pan-European ESRA training

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,…

Rise and shine

Caffeine shortens recovery time from general anesthesia

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.

Point-of-care

The TUBE approach to perioperative point-of-care ultrasound

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…

Pediatrics

Watching movies can replace anaesthesia for children in radiotherapy

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.

Experience

25 years of point-of-care ultrasound in anaesthesia

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

Top anaesthesiologist stresses automation limits

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.

Ebola

Anesthesiologists need to 'better educate' themselves

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.

Faster skin biopsies without anesthesia

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.

Surgery

Sedatives for patients receiving general anesthesia questioned

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…

TAVI rises another step in the United Kingdom

A hospital with a reputation for trailblazing heart surgery has taken transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) onto the next step in the UK.

Optimising peri-operative procedures

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.

Carefully selected devices reward MHH with 50% cost cuts

In intensive care units (ICUs) little can be automated to relieve staff pressures – with the exception of point of care testing (POCT)

Anaesthesiology

Accidental awareness under general anaesthesia

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.

Ambulatory surgery

Massive and increasing cost pressure urges many hospitals to look for alternatives to expensive in-patient surgery.

The 33rd International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine

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.

Still a challenge

Perioperative anaesthesia for patients with heart failure

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.