Diaphragmatic ultrasound assessment of muscle recovery in patients undergoing general anesthesia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Recently, ultrasonography has been used to evaluate respiratory muscle function in intensive care units. Therefore, we aimed to determine whether this evaluation method applies even to patients recovering from general anesthesia. Randomized controlled trials on assessing diaphragmatic ultrasound undergoing general anesthesia were searched in PubMed/MEDLINE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Web of Science databases. Two reviewers will independently screen articles for eligibility and extract relevant data. The risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane Handbook 5.1.0 for systematic reviews of interventions. Higgins' I2, the heterogeneity statistic Cochrane’s Q, and the corresponding P-values were calculated to measure the heterogeneity among the trials. We used R software (version 3.6.3; R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) for all analyses. Of the 165 studies searched, four were ultimately included. The evaluation of the diaphragm for respiratory and muscular recovery was comparable. The standardized mean difference was 1.33 (95% confidence interval, 1.11-1.56). This systematic review evaluates the effectiveness of diaphragmatic ultrasound in assessing respiratory muscle recovery in patients undergoing general anesthesia.

Keywords

• diaphragm
• anesthesia, general
• neuromuscular blockade
• ultrasonography