Anesthetic Implications of the New Guidelines for Button Battery Ingestion in Children

Ingestion of button batteries can result in a catastrophic, lethal injury if diagnosis and management is delayed. In the US, the National Capital Poison Center has established a guideline (https://www.poison.org/battery/guideline) that helps triage patients who present and provides treatment advice based on cadaveric and animal studies. This includes expedited removal and pre-operative use of weak […]

Fifty Percent Effective Dose of Intranasal Dexmedetomidine Sedation for Transthoracic Echocardiography in Children with Cyanotic and Acyanotic Congenital Heart Disease.

In this study, the authors used Dixon’s up-and-down method sequential allocation design to determine the ED50 and ED95 of intranasal dexmedetomidine sedation for transthoracic echocardiography in children with cyanotic and acyanotic congenital heart disease.  This sequential allocation method, which was first described by Dixon and Mood in 1948, is a way to estimate the minimum […]

Medications to reduce emergence coughing after general anaesthesia with tracheal intubation: a systematic review and network meta-analysis

The objective of this review was to determine the relative efficacies of medications in decreasing the incidence of moderate to severe coughing at emergence. 70 RCTs published between 1990 and 2018 were included in the study. The authors constructed a network geometry plot to visualise the relationships between various study medications and performed a network […]

A Narrative Review of Oxygenation During Pediatric Intubation and Airway Procedures

In this review, there is a discussion of the different methods of oxygenation, from traditional low-flow techniques to H2FNOS (read the review to find out what that stands for!). It is a well-written paper that I would encourage others to read. Take home messages Regardless of whether you are delivering oxygen at low flows through […]