PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Every year, more than 300,000 Americans break a hip, according to the CDC. That's a lot of surgeries requiring either general or spinal anesthesia. New research may leave doctors better able to determine which type of anesthesia is best for their patients.
Dr. Mark Neuman, the Horatio C. Wood associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, says many doctors choose one over the other believing it to be safer.
"In the 1,600 patients we enrolled, outcomes were very similar for people who'd been assigned to receive spinal anesthesia versus general anesthesia, in terms of getting back to walking at 60 days, which is a major priority for patients -- survival to 60-days and delirium after surgery," Neuman said.
During general anesthesia, a patient is unconscious and on a breathing tube. With spinal anesthesia the patient gets a needle in the back but remains awake.
"One of the important pieces of our study is it gives some concrete information for the first time that can help inform those choices," Neumann said. "It's always hard to generalize what people like and want in a broad sense, but there certainly are patients who prefer the idea of having spinal anesthesia, and there are others who might prefer having general anesthesia. What our study says is, on average, both of these can be safe choices."
He says this research can help doctors and patients decide which form of anesthesia is best for a patient, case by case.