• Anesthesiology · Feb 1997

    Predicting difficult intubation with indirect laryngoscopy.

    • K Yamamoto, T Tsubokawa, K Shibata, S Ohmura, S Nitta, and T Kobayashi.
    • Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, School of Medicine, Kanazawa University, Japan. kenyam@med.kanazawa-u.ac.jp
    • Anesthesiology. 1997 Feb 1;86(2):316-21.

    BackgroundIt is not always possible to predict when tracheal intubation will be difficult or impossible. The authors wanted to determine whether indirect laryngoscopy could identify patients in whom intubation was difficult.MethodsIndirect laryngoscopy was done in 2,504 patients. The Wilson risk sum score and the modified Mallampati score were also studied in a different series of 3,680 patients for comparison. These predictive methods were compared according to three parameters: positive predictive value, sensitivity, and specificity.ResultsOf 6,184 patients studied, the trachea proved difficult to intubate in 82 (1.3%). Positive predictive value (31%) and specificity (98.4%) with indirect laryngoscopy were greater than the other two predictive methods (P < 0.01), whereas sensitivity with indirect laryngoscopy (69.2%) was greater than that of the Wilson risk sum score (55.4%) (P < 0.01).ConclusionsAlthough in 15% of patients indirect laryngoscopy could not be performed because of excessive gag reflex, indirect laryngoscopy can serve as an effective method to predict difficult intubation.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

Want more great medical articles?

Keep up to date with a free trial of metajournal, personalized for your practice.
1,624,503 articles already indexed!

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.