Conscious Sedation with Dexmedetomidine in Awake Surgery

Background: It is well demonstrated that awake surgery for brain tumours is the gold standard to achieve the maximal safe resection. On the other hand, many surgeons prefer general anesthesia in order to avoid useless stress for patients. The aim of our paper is to investigate if there are clinical and biochemical findings demonstrating a different stress level in patients who underwent awake craniotomy compared to those who underwent totally asleep surgery. Methods: We compared our awake craniotomy series performed with conscious sedation using Dexmedetomidine to a group of patients treated in general anesthesia settings in terms of patient stress, rated by blood pressure, heart rate, glycaemia, lactate values, post-operative ischemia or bleeding at the MRI. We also compared the duration of surgeries in the two groups and the relations between time and other parameters. Results: We found that preoperative heart rate was higher in the awake group (63.00 (SD13.58) vs. 76.5 (SD 14.34) p value 0.025) together with preoperative systolic blood pressure 122 (SD 12.95 vs. 135.1 SD (11.78) p value 0.044). However there were no clinical, biochemical and radiological differences in post-operative period in the two groups, suggesting the efficacy of Dexmedetomidine in stress control. It is demonstrated a cause-effect relation between the duration of surgery and the raising of blood pressure, suggesting that conscious sedation can reduce useless anesthesiological time in the awake surgery setting. Conclusions: We showed that the two anesthetic settings are similar in terms of stress parameters after surgery. This finding could be confirmed in a prospective study with a higher number of patients.