Intraoperative awareness and the depth of anesthesia in children: a perspective from pediatric anesthesia.
The bispectral index (BIS) monitoring, using electroencephalographically-derived method, has shown some promise to measure 'depth of anesthesia' for various anesthetics. A large fraction of the literature that has investigated BIS monitoring demonstrates that BIS correlates well with clinically important endpoints and many clinical utility trials have been undertaken in adults to prove its effectiveness to improve perioperative patient care. As the use of the technology grows, other potential applications have been investigated; BIS as a monitor in pediatric anesthesia and BIS as a monitor to measure the depth of sleep may serve as examples. If the two are proved useful, these successes may bring clinicians another application of this technology: BIS to monitor unconsciousness state of babies to prevent sudden infant death syndrome or apparent life threatening event.
Department of Anesthesiology, Tokyo Women's Medical University, 8-1 Kawadacho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8666, Japan. uezeno@anes.twmu.ac.jp
Shoichi
S
Uezono
Aya
A
Kamata
Osamu
O
Nagata
Makoto
M
Ozaki