Outcomes from wake up safe, the pediatric anesthesia quality improvement initiative.

BACKGROUND: Wake Up Safe, a Patient Safety Organization founded by the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia, collects data on serious adverse events along with demographic data from all pediatric patients receiving anesthesia care at participating institutions. This report reviews all events occurring between 2010 and 2015 and focuses on common adverse events that are anesthesia-related. AIMS: Determine which adverse events were most common from 2010 to 2015 among participating Wake Up Safe institutions. Determine how many anesthesia-related events were deemed to be preventable. METHODS: This is a descriptive report. The Wake Up Safe registry data were queried on September 29, 2017. Institutions were included if they had complete demographic data and at least 5 adverse events per year reported. At that time, 19 out of 29 institutions had complete demographic data for events from 2010 to 2015. This study describes demographic data and adverse events from these nineteen institutions. Descriptive data were extracted, and event rate was calculated for each adverse event category. In events that were assessed as primarily related to anesthesia, further detailed analysis was performed. RESULTS: Of all reported adverse events (2544 events), the most common were cardiac arrests (646, 31.6%), respiratory complications (598, 29.2%), and medication events (345, 16.9%). Of all anesthesia-related events (612 events), medication events were the most common (239, 31.9%), followed by respiratory complications (181, 24.1%), and cardiac arrests (139, 18.5%). Overall, 85% of anesthesia-related serious adverse events were deemed somewhat or almost certainly preventable. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of anesthesia-related serious adverse events reported to the Wake Up Safe database are preventable. Medication events are the most common anesthesia-related adverse events. Innovations aimed at decreasing medication events may be the most impactful.

Using Neuroimaging to Study the Effects of Pain, Analgesia, and Anesthesia on Brain Development.

Neuroimaging has been increasingly used as a modality to study the impact of pain, analgesia, and anesthetics on pediatric neurodevelopment. The sixth biennial Pediatric Anesthesia Neurodevelopmental Assessment (PANDA) Symposium addressed the 2016 US Food and Drug Administration drug safety warning regarding the potential neurotoxic effects of commonly used anesthetic and sedative medications in children, and included a session discussing the use of various neuroimaging techniques, to detect structural, metabolic, and functional brain changes that can occur with exposure to pain and to anesthetic medications. The presenters concluded that advanced multimodal magnetic resonance imaging techniques are useful in detecting the aforementioned changes, which were found to be pain-specific and anesthetic agent-specific.

The prevalence of allergic rhinitis and atopic markers in obstructive sleep apnea.

Allergic rhinitis (AR) related inflammation might worsen the severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), however, the relationship between the two disorders remains controversial. Our aim was to determine the prevalence of AR and atopic markers in OSA. This cross-sectional study recruited participants with sleep-related complaints referred to a sleep center from February 2013 to June 2014. The diagnosis of OSA was based on the Berlin questionnaire (BQ) followed by confirmatory polysomnography (PSG). The diagnosis of AR was made via focused history and clinical examination and was confirmed by measuring atopic markers. OSA was diagnosed in 97 out of 157 adults attending the sleep clinic (61.8%). There was a high prevalence of AR (52.6%) among OSA individuals. This was not significantly different from the frequency in the non-OSA individuals (p=0.5). Elevated total immunoglobulin E (IgE; >100K/µL), eosinophil count, and positive Phadiatop tests were found in individuals with OSA to be 37.1%, 11.3%, and 41.2%, respectively. Individuals without OSA have shown similar percentages. In our cohort, there was no significant difference in frequency of AR and atopy among participants with OSA compared to those without OSA.