Spinal anesthesia may offer a safer, not to mention shorter, recovery period for patients who undergo elective hip and knee replacement surgeries, according to a team of Canadian researchers.
For their study, published online by the journal Anesthesiology, the University of Toronto researchers observed the cases of 10,868 patients who'd had their joints replaced between January 2003 and December 2014.
Of those patients, 8,553 were administered spinal anesthesia and the other 2,315 received general anesthesia. The lower 30-day mortality rate among the spinal anesthesia group (0.19% versus general's 0.8%) was supplemented by a shorter length of hospital stay (5.7 versus 6.6 days).
While the study also tracked the incidence of cardiac events, pulmonary embolisms, blood loss and OR time among the 2 groups, it did not note statistically significant differences between them.
