Sarcouncil Journal of Medical Sciences

Abstract: Background: Thoracotomy is still a significant surgical operation that is accompanied by a considerable amount of morbidity following the surgery. The patients were classified according to the method of anaesthesia: general anaesthesia (GA) alone (n=42), general anaesthesia with thoracic epidural (n=52), and paravertebral block (n=22). The main outcome measures were the postoperative complications, pain measurement, and the length of stay. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression were used to analyse the risk factors. Correlation analysis was used to test correlations between continuous variables. Findings refer to the average age was 58.4 years, and 67.2% of the patients were men. The total complication was 50.0% (58/116). The most frequent complications were pulmonary (36.2%), which included atelectasis (24.1%), pneumonia (15.5%), and prolonged air leak (13.8%). Patients experienced cardiovascular complications in 22.4% of the cases; arrhythmias (15.5%). The pain (VAS>7) was severe in the epidural group in the GA alone (15.4% vs. 47.6%, p<0.001), where in our study, the epidural anaesthesia also lowered chronic post-thoracotomy pain (7.7% vs. 33.3, p=0.004). There were positive relationships between the duration of surgery and blood loss (r=0.62, p<0.001) and between the complications and hospital stay (10.8±4.8 vs. 6.0±2.1 days, p<0.001). The predictive model was found to be a good discriminator (AUC=0.756), so finally we concluded that thoracotomy is a procedure that is linked with significant morbidity, and it occurs in 50 percent of all patients. Furthermore, thoracic epidural analgesia has a great capacity in relieving acute and chronic pain than general anaesthesia itself.