Brain Aging and Anesthesia.

Herein, the authors review the neuroanatomical and the neurophysiological aspects of the normal aging evolution based on the recent literature and briefly describe the difference between physiological and pathological brain aging, with consideration of the currently recommended anesthesia management of older patients. The population of elderly patients is growing drastically with advances in medicine that have prolonged the life span. One of the direct consequence has been a significant increase in the request for anesthesia care for older patients despite the type of surgery (cardiac vs noncardiac and mainly orthopedic). Because the brain of this category of patients undergoes a specific triple influence (immune, metabolic, and inflammatory), some particular physiological, anatomical, and structural modifications must be taken into account because they expose these patients more specifically to postoperative cognitive disturbances. To prevent type of adverse outcome, a better knowledge and understanding of these neurosciences must be promoted. The strategies developed to prevent such adverse outcomes include the determination and detection of significant at-risk patients and improvement in the titration of anesthesia to reduce exposure of anesthesia to these patients through an adapted anesthesia-induced unconsciousness that avoids, as much as possible, the risk of toxic overdose with an overly deep brain depression. To accomplish this, the unprocessed electroencephalogram (EEG) and its spectrogram may represent a significant improvement in monitoring, first by allowing for the rapid recognition of repetitive or persistent EEG suppression by the on-line reading of the raw EEG trace and second by allowing for the accurate determination of the adequate anesthetic-induced state, obtained in general in this category of patients by substantially lowered doses of anesthetic agents. This represents a new methodology for anesthesia titration that is adjusted on a more case-by-case basis and is related to the physiology of individual patients. A better understanding of aging-induced brain transformations remains the key regarding the improvement of the anesthetic management of the always growing population of elderly patients. The promotion of the unprocessed EEG may represent the best method of preventing the risk of anesthetic toxicity, including postoperative cognitive dysfunctions.

Elective tracheostomy in intensive care unit: Looking between techniques, a three cases report.

There is no optimal tracheostomy (TS) technique, proved to be the best. For this reason, operators' skills, clinical anatomical and physio-pathological features of the patient should be considered as discriminating factors in the choice of percutaneous dilation tracheostomy (PDT) technique. This article includes reports of three cases of PDT: In the first case distance between jugular notch and the first tracheal ring was too long, the second case involving a patient with mild ectasia of the ascending aorta and aortic regurgitation with De Musset's sign with great risk of perioperative bleeding and a third case, of tracheomalacia with inflammatory stenosis at the 4(th) tracheal ring. All together, this case series describes how decisions were made by an experienced staff, in which the patient characteristics were assessed and techniques best suited for each case were implemented.