TAP block - or general anaesthesia?

The Transversus Abdominis Plane (TAP) block: Abdominal plane regional anaesthesia

HISTORY OF THE TAP BLOCK Abdominal field blocks and costo-iliac block have been used in anaesthesia for surgery involving the anterior abdominal wall for several decades. A technique involving multiple injections of local anaesthetic in the abdominal wall was used in the 1980s.1 This technique was improved with a blind landmark technique, via the ‘lumbar triangle of Petit’.2 The clinical effica...

Extradural, spinal or combined block for obstetric surgical anaesthesia.

Sir,—Dr Carrie, in an otherwise excellent review of regional anaesthesia in operative obstetrics [1], dismisses the practice of warming bupivacaine before extradural injection as being inconvenient and hardly merited because of a reduction of block onset time of only 20%. In this respect, he quotes our study [2] which recorded a reduction of 30 % in onset time. Moreover, we demonstrated a 23% r...

Anaesthesia for carotid endarterectomy - general or loco-regional?

Carotid endarterectomy has been widely used for the surgical treatment of carotid stenosis, and may be performed under either general or loco-regional anaesthesia. The greatest risks of carotid endarterectomy are the neurologic complications and the myocardial infarction. Anaesthetic and surgical techniques are constantly under scrutiny to try to reduce the relatively high incidence of morbidit...

Laser treatment for tracheobronchial tumours: local or general anaesthesia?

Ninety seven patients with tracheobronchial tumours have been treated with the neodymium yttrium-aluminium-garnet (Nd YAG) laser over a period of 33 months. Fifty one of these patients were treated under local anaesthesia and 46 under general anaesthesia. The results obtained with the two methods have been compared retrospectively. The numbers of patients responding to treatment, the magnitude ...

Ultrasound-guided transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block.