Paediatric anaesthesia
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Paediatric anaesthesia · Aug 2017
Ultrasound assessment of gastric emptying after breakfast in healthy preschool children.
In current guidelines, 6 hours of fasting is recommended for solids to limit the risk of pulmonary aspiration during anesthesia in children. Ultrasonography has recently been introduced to evaluate gastric volumes in children in the context of preanesthetic fasting. Therefore, in this study, we firstly evaluated the precision of ultrasound assessment of gastric volume in an experimental setting and secondly studied gastric emptying times after a normal breakfast in healthy preschool children using ultrasound. ⋯ The results of the balloon experiment showed a high correlation between balloon antral area and balloon volume. In the preschool child measurements, gastric antral area correlated with fasting time, and the mean gastric emptying time was lower than 4 hours after breakfast. These results support a more liberal perioperative fasting regimen after a light meal or breakfast in routine pediatric anesthesia.
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Paediatric anaesthesia · Aug 2017
Preoperative colonization in pediatric cardiac surgery and its impact on postoperative infections.
Patients with congenital heart defects are frequently hospitalized before surgery. This exposes them to a high risk for pathogen colonization. There are limited data on colonization prevalence in the pediatric cardiac population, and limited data concerning its potential role in the risk of developing infections after cardiac surgery. ⋯ The results of our study suggest that the impact of preoperative colonization on outcome and postoperative infections may be negligible; larger series are required to clearly define this issue.