DOI: 10.36106/ijsr/7404921 ISSN:

A CORRELATION OF ULTRASONOGRAPHY-GUIDED VERSUS CLINICALLY MEASURED AIRWAY PARAMETERS IN PREDICTING DIFFICULT LARYNGOSCOPY – A PROSPECTIVE OBSERVATIONAL STUDY

Siva V, Shaji Mathew, Savan Kumar Nagesh
  • General Medicine
  • Applied Mathematics
  • General Mathematics
  • General Medicine
  • General Chemistry
  • Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine
  • Pediatrics, Perinatology, and Child Health
  • Microbiology
  • Immunology
  • General Medicine
  • General Medicine
  • Pharmacology (medical)
  • General Medicine

Background and aims: Airway management is one of the routine tasks in practicing anaesthesiologist life on a day-to-day basis ranging from intubation for elective surgical cases to emergency intubation for cardiac arrest patients. Ranging between 1.5- 13% is the incidence of unexpected difcult laryngoscopy and tracheal intubation. To determine whether skin to epiglottis thickness aids in predicting difcult laryngoscopy in patients with unanticipated difcult airway and to determine the correlation between ratio of height to thyromental distance and skin to epiglottis thickness. The study also focuses in predicting a cut off value of skin to epiglottis in the study population. Methods:After ethical approval and trial registration, 225 participants were enrolled in the study and ratio of height to thyromental distance and ultrasound guided skin to epiglottis distance were measured along with other airway parameters. The Pearson correlation test was used to corelate clinical and USG parameter in airway. The level of signicance was set at P < 0.05 Results: Demographic data were equally distributed. All patients were successfully intubated in the study. The cut off value derived from ROC for US-SED was 2.45 cm with 82.2% sensitivity and 76.7% specicity. So above 2.45 cm one should anticipate difcult laryngoscopy. Cut-off value for RHTMD in predicting difcult laryngoscopy observed in our trial was > 24.7 but lacks greater sensitivity (57.8%) and specicity (69.4%). Conclusion:Cut off value of skin to epiglottis distance above which one can anticipate a difcult laryngoscopy is 2.45 cm Even though ratio of height to thyromental distance above 24.7 can predict difcult laryngoscopy, it lacks greater sensitivity and specicity

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