SAN DIEGO-Gentler anesthesia spares many mastectomy patients postop narcotics.
In a two-year retrospective study at Duke, pain relief lasted a mean of 10 hours for 119 patients having mastectomies under paravertebral block, compared with 40 minutes for 89 patients getting a general.
Only 28 paravertebral-block patients required postop narcotic analgesics, vs. all but two who got general anesthesia, says Dr. Roy Greengrass. Of the block patients, 23 developed nausea and vomiting requiring antiemetics, vs. 35 given a general.
One block patient had a pneumothorax not requiring a chest tube, two developed epidural spread, and four were converted to a general, he told the American Society of Anesthesiologists meeting here.
