Regional Anesthesia in Breast Surgery

Abstract

B reast surgeries are very common among female patients all over the world. General anesthesia is the usual and common type of anesthesia for patients undergoing different types of breast surgeries. General anesthesia doesn’t provide adequate post-operative analgesia and this can affect respiratory functions on recovery. Using regional anesthesia either alone or in addition to general anesthesia improves patients experience with post-operative pain and decrease analgesics needed for post-operative period. Recently, different techniques of regional blocks can be used for this type of surgeries, techniques as epidural anesthesia, paravertebral block and intercostals nerve block depend on landmark identification and easily can be used with almost all patients. Ultrasound use with paravertebral block and intercostals block improve the outcome. More recent blocks as PECS I, PECS II, serratus plane block and BRILMA needs expert operator and offer very good analgesia for post-operative period.