Monitor detects awareness during surgery

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 15 Apr 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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Patients describe it as like being buried alive. The worse part is not the pain, they say, although that can be excruciating, but the horror of being paralysed, unable to talk and yet totally aware of what the surgeon is doing to you.

Suffering like this could be greatly reduced. A large international trial has proved that a simple "awareness" device, called a BIS monitor, can cut the number of cases of awareness during surgery by 80 per cent.

The device is already used to monitor the depth of anaesthesia in some hospitals in the US, but few anaesthetists in the UK or Australia use it.

The trial was run by Paul Myles of the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and Kate Leslie of the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Leslie says that the evidence is so compelling that BIS monitoring should always be used during the 5 per cent or so of operations where there is a high risk of awareness.

Myles goes further, arguing that it should be used for the 50 per cent of operations where there is a chance of awareness occurring.

Other anaesthetists argue that the BIS monitor and others like it need to be more accurate before they are routinely employed. Disturbingly, though, it seems that many anaesthetists do not even recognise the need for a monitor because they grossly underestimate the likelihood of patients becoming aware.

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