Journal of anesthesia
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Perioperative anaphylaxis is a life-threatening clinical condition that is typically the result of drugs or substances used for anesthesia or surgery. The most common cause of anaphylaxis during anesthesia is reportedly neuromuscular blocking agents. Of the many muscle relaxants that are clinically available, rocuronium is becoming popular in many countries. ⋯ Thus, anesthesiologists should be familiar with the epidemiology, mechanisms, and clinical presentations of anaphylaxis induced by these drugs. In this review, we focus on the diagnosis and treatment of anaphylaxis to sugammadex and neuromuscular blocking agents. Moreover, we discuss recent studies in this field, including the diagnostic utility of flow cytometry and improvement of rocuronium-induced anaphylaxis with the use of sugammadex.
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Journal of anesthesia · Apr 2016
ReviewIschaemic and inflammatory injury in renal graft from brain death donation: an update review.
Renal transplantation remains an important therapy in treating renal failure and can be considered to be a curative treatment. The demand for renal grafts outstrips supply available each year, making it increasingly important to look at improving the treatment of both renal grafts and recipients, and thereby improving patient outcomes and increasing the pool of potential donor grafts. Important to this, however, is knowledge of the underlying mechanisms leading to damage to the graft and rejection from the recipient. ⋯ This makes the time period involving both explantation and storage an important therapeutic window for improving outcomes. Other windows explored include treatment of IRI and improvement in immunosuppressive therapy. The multiple windows of potential therapeutic input have spawned a large body of work exploring both the underlying mechanisms and also how to exploit these mechanisms to improve overall outcomes and to allow for more marginal organs to be used.
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In this review, we describe the current consensus surrounding general anesthetic management for cesarean section. For induction of anesthesia, rapid-sequence induction using thiopental and suxamethonium has been the recommended standard for a long time. In recent years, induction of anesthesia using propofol, rocuronium, and remifentanil have been gaining popularity. ⋯ After the delivery of a fetus, switching from volatile anesthetics to intravenous anesthetics has been recommended to avoid uterine atony. At the same time, intraoperative awareness should be avoided. The rate of persistent wound pain is higher when only general anesthesia was used during cesarean section than with regional anesthesia, and thus it is necessary to provide a sufficient postoperative analgesia using multimodal analgesia, including intravenous patient-controlled analgesia (IV-PCA), transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block, non-steroidal inflammatory drugs, and acetaminophen.
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Journal of anesthesia · Apr 2016
ReviewReview of crisis resource management (CRM) principles in the setting of intraoperative malignant hyperthermia.
The practice of medicine is characterized by routine and typical cases whose management usually goes according to plan. However, the occasional case does arise which involves rare catastrophic emergencies, such as intraoperative malignant hyperthermia (MH), which require a comprehensive, coordinated, and resource-intensive treatment plan. ⋯ However, physicians can become expert in the global process of managing emergencies by using the principles of crisis resource management (CRM). In this article, we review the key concepts of CRM, using a real life example of a team who utilized CRM principles to successfully manage an intraoperative MH crisis, despite there being no one on the team who had ever previously encountered a true MH crisis.
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Journal of anesthesia · Apr 2016
ReviewEmergence agitation in children: risk factors, prevention, and treatment.
Emergence agitation (EA) in children is a major postoperative issue that increases the risk of patient self-harm, places a burden on nursing staff, and reduces parent satisfaction with treatment. Risk factors for EA include age, preoperative anxiety, patient personality, pain, anesthesia method, and surgical procedure. ⋯ Maintenance of anesthesia using propofol has also been shown to prevent EA. In children, anesthesia methods that are unlikely to cause EA should be selected, with the prompt adminstration of appropriate treatment in cases of EA.