High Thoracic Epidural Anesthesia in Cardiac Surgery as a Sole Anesthetic Technique. Series of 12 Interventions.

Abstract

Epidural anesthesia has been used widely as a combination to general anesthesia in cardiac surgery since early seventies. The addition of this technique to general anesthesia may have beneficial effects on clinical outcome. Several clinical trials and experiments have shown that there may be significant benefits using epidural anesthesia in cardiac surgery. Somehow neuroaxial blockade manages to attenuate the response to surgical stress and improve perioperative analgesia. Between august 2014 and September 2018, high thoracic epidural anesthesia was applied to 12 patients as a sole anesthetic technique. Epidural anesthesia was chosen because the patients had relative contraindications to general anesthesia and mechanical ventilation. This paper gives an overview of epidural anesthesia usage and our experience.

Keywords

• Analgesia
• epidural anesthesia
• epidural
• blood pressure
• cardiac surgery