Week 1: I told an anesthesia pun, but they slept right through it
Welcome back to our first official post guys!
My first week of research was messaging my mentor and doing my own research online but I found out a ton of information that was extremely interesting and I am excited to share with you. Nonetheless, my mentor did get back to me with some feedback on my proposal and wanted to clarify some information with me first, so I will be talking about that before I talk about my own research.
My mentor clarified that for patients under the age of 10, they usually do inhalation induction, which means the child will breath anesthetic gas through a mask, and once they are asleep they will start the IV. They do inhalation induction to avoid the trauma of an IV being put into them; although, there are some rare occurrences where they have to use an IV to induce them. She also told me that an example of having to use an IV instead of inhalation induction is when a child has an emergency surgery and they have possible food in their stomach, which when inhalation anesthesia is used can come back up after they wake up from surgery. Furthermore, when they have to put the breathing tube in the trachea (in lower neck and upper chest, below your voice box) and blow up a cuff that prevents stomach contents from getting into the lungs and causing aspiration pneumonia which has a high date rate. After the age of 10, inhalation induction is rarely used anymore since body weight increases but so does the time to get to sleep breathing anesthesia gas only. Apparently there are stages of anesthesia as well, specifically during stage 2 the patient is at higher risk for having laryngospasm, which is where the vocal cords slam shut in a spasm and don’t allow air into the patient, and if this does not release they have to give a paralyzing agent IV to break it. For patients over 10 this is a more common occurrence which is why they do not do inhalation induction unless it’s necessary. Propofol is the main agent used in the IV to put the patient to sleep but it wears off quickly so they keep the patient asleep with gas anesthesia.
My own research led me on the same route as my mentor was talking about it also strayed into a different direction talking about cardiovascular disease and other diseases and what their effects on the anesthesia used. Diabetes is one pre-existing condition that an anesthesiologist has to take into account along with the degree and duration. Also, obesity in patients increases the anesthetic risk since it is more difficult for them to breathe on their own when not awake. I explored a lot more websites and information on my own but I don’t have room in this blog to talk about them so I will talk about it more in my next blog post!
Thanks for reading!
Maggie 🙂