New GLP-1 guidance urges longer fasting before anesthesia
Editor's Note Patients taking GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) do not need to discontinue these medications before undergoing anesthesia but should follow extended preoperative fasting protocols to reduce aspiration risk, according to a June 5 article in Medscape. As detailed in the article, this recommendation comes from a new multidisciplinary…
Partnership with Epic fuels ASA’s push for smarter, safer anesthesia
Editor's Note The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) has partnered with Epic to launch the Anesthesia Community Registry (ACR), which is designed to enable easier data collection, benchmarking, and insight generation at scale. Powered by Epic’s new Community Registries platform, the ACR will complement ASA’s existing National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes…
Doctoral training becomes the new norm for CRNAs starting in 2025
Editor's Note All newly certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) in the US will be required to hold a doctoral degree, marking a significant shift in training standards for the profession, according to a May 3 post by James Allen, MD, on his page, “Hospital Medical Director,” also covered by Becker's…
Study: Surgeon-anesthesiologist familiarity could reduce complications in select surgeries
Editor's Note Greater familiarity between surgeons and anesthesiologists was associated with reduced major morbidity in certain high-risk procedures, according to a Canadian retrospective cohort study published in JAMA Surgery. As detailed in a May 28 report from MedPage Today, the population-based analysis included more than 711,000 index procedures, finding an…
Study: Procedural sedation causes heat loss on par with general anesthesia in endoscopy patients
Editor's Note Research shows patients undergoing procedural sedation for endoscopic procedures experience significant and often undetected heat loss comparable to that seen during general anesthesia despite widespread assumptions that sedation preserves thermoregulation. Findings were published May 27 in The Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing. Conducted at a tertiary hospital in…
Study: EEG-guided anesthesia halves anesthetic use, accelerates recovery in pediatric surgery
Editor's Note EEG-guided anesthesia reduces drug use and speeds recovery in children, according to an April 22 report in Neuroscience News. The article focuses on a clinical trial, conducted in Japan and published April 21 in JAMA Pediatrics, comparing standard anesthesia dosing with EEG-guided dosing in more than 170 surgical…
Personalized perioperative pain management reduces opioid use
Editor's Note Helping patients taper opioids preoperatively before deploying multimodal care strategies can help prevent instances of patients already with prescriptions going home with even higher doses. That’s the main takeaway from an April 22 MedCentral interview with Marie N. Hanna, MD, division chief for regional anesthesia and acute pain…
Smart patient selection anchors DISC’s high-acuity spine ASC model
Editor's Note Ambulatory surgery center (ASC) leaders elevate safety by treating patient selection as a clinical gatekeeper, then prop that rigor with data-driven workflows, advanced monitoring, and targeted robotics to bring complex spine cases safely into the outpatient space. An interview with Glenn Snyders Jr, MD, medical director and head…
Study: GLP-1 drugs heighten risk of gastric residue but not perioperative pulmonary aspiration
Editor's Note Taking GLP-1 receptor agonists before anesthesia increases the risk of residual gastric contents, but evidence is lacking for a corresponding increase in perioperative pulmonary aspiration risk, according research published April 15 in the journal Anaesthesia. The systematic review and meta-analysis analyzed 28 observational studies involving over 466,000 patients…
Study: Cannabis use complicates sedation, cancer care
Editor's Note Cannabis users may require higher doses of anesthetics during sedation and experience worse physical and psychological symptoms during cancer treatment, according to an April 7 announcement from the University of Oklahoma (OU). Publishing in the journal Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, a multidisciplinary team of university researchers found that cannabis users…
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