Different regional anesthesia techniques for modified radical mastectomy- A case series

Abstract

General anesthesia (GA) is the most common form of anesthesia provided to patients who need radical mastectomy, because surgery in this area is painful and most of the patients demand complete sleep during the surgical procedure. Significant interventions have been made in the recent years, especially in the regional anesthetic techniques using the ultrasonogram. Hence, most of these surgeries, nowadays, are being performed by combined GA and regional techniques. However, some patients might pose greater risks for GA thereby making the anesthesiologists think of regional techniques as a sole mode of anesthesia. Here, we present a case series of three patients with major co-morbidities who successfully underwent radical mastectomies under regional anesthesia. We used combined thoracic spinal/epidural for two patients while one patient had pectoral nerve block II (PECS II) with additional subcutaneous infiltrations. Only a few studies or case reports are available in the literature using regional techniques as surgical anesthesia for radical mastectomies while we used different combinations which have not been described in the literature.

Key words: Modified radical mastectomy, regional techniques, combined thoracic spinal epidural, PECS blocks.

Citation: Botta BV, Nithyasundar K, Balasubramanian K, Kamalakannan T, Sethuraman RM. Different regional anesthesia techniques for modified radical mastectomy; a case series. Anaesth. pain intensive care 2023;27(3):426−428; DOI: 10.35975/apic.v27i3.1974

Received: August 16, 2022; Reviewed: February 06, 2023; Accepted: April 20, 2023