Articles: general-anesthesia.
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Review Comparative Study
Recovery advantages of regional anesthesia compared with general anesthesia: adult patients.
The data support but do not conclusively prove, that RA results in a superior recovery compared with GA. However, several questions need to be answered. ⋯ Anesthetic techniques need to be carefully compared to determine whether they are equal in quality, efficiency, and cost. Finally, to determine whether RA is cost-effective, future studies involving ambulatory patients with a focus on outcome and well-being need to be conducted.
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Comparative Study
Thoracic epidural anesthesia improves outcome after breast surgery.
The authors' objective was to compare the outcomes, including the incidence of nausea and vomiting and the time until discharge to home, of patients undergoing general anesthesia and thoracic epidural anesthesia for oncologic breast procedures. ⋯ Thoracic epidural anesthesia is a safe technique not associated with neurologic or respiratory complications. The use of thoracic epidural anesthesia for breast surgery could improve patients recovery and reduce the cost of these procedures.
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Can learning occur during general anaesthesia? This paper reviews the studies which have addressed this issue and finds some evidence of implicit memory for intra-operative events, even with clinically adequate anaesthesia. This has implications both for clinical practice and for psychological theories of learning and awareness. ⋯ Methodological improvements are discussed, in particular the need for a reliable means of monitoring awareness during anaesthesia. These improvements would enable researchers to determine the conditions under which learning occurs and would provide information about the role of consciousness in learning.
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We aimed to describe the frequency of atelectasis occurring during anaesthesia, to describe the size and pattern of the atelectasis, and to standardise the method of identifying the atelectasis and calculate its area. ⋯ On the basis of the present findings, we defined atelectasis as pulmonary dependent densities with attenuation values of -100 to +100 HU.