Anaesthesia
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Graphical displays of past and future levels of drugs may be a useful adjunct to manual dosing. We have previously found that a display of predicted future values speeds step changes in end-tidal sevoflurane. In this study anaesthetists made step changes of 0.3% in effect site sevoflurane, with and without the display and as increases and decreases. ⋯ When the predictive display was present, users made larger vaporiser dial changes of 3.9% vs 3.1% (95% CI for the difference -1.3% to -0.01%, p = 0.046) reflected in larger end-tidal changes (95% CI for the difference -0.009 vol% to -0.34 vol%, p = 0.06). There was no difference in the speed of change (220 vs 227 s (95% CI for the difference -51 to 32 s)), or in the accuracy of the change. In this study the predictive display influenced the magnitude of the step changes made by anaesthetists but did not affect the speed or overall accuracy of the change.
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While previous studies have investigated the country of origin of anaesthetic publications, they have generally used a medline computer search to identify original articles and have often excluded non-English language articles. We undertook a hand-search of journals in the Journal Citation Reports using the subject category of Anesthesiology. We quantified the number of original articles, editorials, review articles, case reports and correspondence attributed to each country. ⋯ High-income countries published 89.2% of original articles, middle-income countries 10.5%, and low-income countries just 0.3%. There were more articles published by middle-income countries during the study period than a decade earlier, notably from Turkey, China and India. We discuss barriers to publications from low-income countries.
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Letter Multicenter Study
Tracheal tube introducers: choose and use with care.
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Intravenous lipid emulsion is established therapy for bupivacaine induced cardiotoxicity. The benefit of combined hypertonic saline and lipid treatment is unexplored. ⋯ No difference was observed in rates of circulatory return (7/10 lipid only and 9/10 lipid plus hypertonic saline; p = 0.58) or survival (5/10 lipid only and 6/10 lipid plus hypertonic saline; p = 1.00). Some benefit to cardiac conduction may be afforded by hypertonic saline co-administered with lipid emulsion in bupivacaine-induced cardiotoxicity.