Paraplegia and cardiac arrest: case reports.

CLINICAL LITERATURE discusses a variety of complications which may affect the paraplegic patient. The attending physician must take special care of these patients to prevent and, ff necessary, to treat these complications. A paraplegic individual is not uncommonly a candidate for a surgical procedure. It has not been sufficiently stressed in the literature that such a patient readily suffers from shock due to autonomic imbalance with loss of sympathetic tone. The hazard of profound hypotensi0n, resulting in cardiac arrest when the anaesthetized paraplegic patient's position was altered, is emphasized by two episodes observed in this hospital. Both patients could be resuscitated and one of them was again anaesthetized and operated upon 16 days after the episode of cardiac arrest.