Awareness under Rapid Sequence Induction : Fordypning i våkenhet under anestesi og opplegg for videre studie

Abstract

Awareness during anaesthesia is still an occuring problem although medical science has achieved immense progress in the recent decades. The experience of postoperative awareness can have great impact on the patients life, sometimes resulting in longstanding psychological impairment or trauma. Several large retrospective studies have shown that the incidence of awareness lies between 0.1-0.2 % in patients who received general anaesthesia during surgery. Some groups of patients however have a significant higher incidence. This applies especially to traumatized patients, where the incidence of awareness has been shown to lie between 11- 43 %. The incidence of awareness during anaesthesia has never been examined under the special regimen of anaesthesia called Rapid Sequence Induction. This is the regimen usually given to traumatized patients. Our project has been aiming to find a rational method to examine for awareness under Rapid Sequence Induction under an ongoing study in which the researchers are trying to develop a more favourable anaesthetic regimen for head trauma patients. With this project we also intend to monitor the quality of the new regimen used in the study. After a thorough study of the literature we have chosen to use a modified semi-structured interview, vital parameters, BIS-values and catecholamine-samples to carry out our project. Although the size of our study is relatively small(n=84) and therefore could be somewhat weak to predict a valid incidence, it still might have an impact in the further improvement of the RSI regimen and will surely contribute to avoid a relative increase in the incidence of awareness during anaesthesia.