Compared to post-general anesthesia, stays shorter after breast surgery and thyroidectomy
MONDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- A combination of hypnosis and local anesthesia (LA) can be effectively used for both breast cancer surgery and video-assisted thyroidectomy by reducing pain medication use and pain scores and decreasing time spent in hospital, according to two studies presented at the European Anaesthesiology Congress, held from June 11 to 14 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Fabienne Roelants, M.D., from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, and colleagues compared the efficacy of a combination of hypnosis and LA to general anesthesia (GA) for 78 breast cancer patients who underwent quadrantectomy and sentinel node biopsy or axillary dissection. Operative time and time spent in the operating room were similar for both groups. Patients treated with hypnosis and LA used significantly less pain-relief medication (ephedrine, and acetaminophen in the recovery room), and they had a significantly shorter hospital stay.
Christine Watremez, M.D., also from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and colleagues compared the efficacy of hypnosis and LA to GA for reducing the invasiveness of video-assisted thyroidectomy in 54 patients who underwent partial or total thyroidectomy. There was no difference in operative time, time spent in the operating room, or pain scores in the recovery room. Patients in the hypnosis group spent significantly less time in the recovery room, and a significantly higher percentage were discharged at six hours and spent less than a day in hospital, compared to those who had GA.
"Hypnosis presents [fewer] side effects than GA and could potentially decrease the cost of the procedure by shortening the hospital stay," Watremez and colleagues write.
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