Chest
Comparison of Three Methods of Respiratory Care following Upper Abdominal Surgery
Section snippets
MATERIALS AND METHODS
One hundred fifty patients on the general surgical service of the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center who were undergoing elective upper-abdominal surgery were the subjects of this study. Because of incomplete data, 24 patients were excluded, so that 126 individuals comprised the substance of this study. After obtaining an informed consent, each patient was randomly assigned to one of the following groups for treatment, using a system of computer-generated random
RESULTS
The characteristics of the three groups are shown in Table 1. The majority of the patients in all three groups were middle-aged women who underwent gall bladder resection. The surgical procedure usually lasted no more than three hours. All patients had general anesthesia, with cyclopropane or nitrous oxide as the anesthetic agent. They had been smoking less than one pack of cigarettes per day and had no past history of pulmonary disease. There were no statistically significant differences in
DISCUSSION
Based upon the results of this study, it would appear that when used in the manner described herein, incentive spirometric therapy is not superior to resistance breathing in the prevention of postoperative pulmonary complications. Both are only slightly better than IPPB. Whether or not any one of the methods of treatment significantly reduced the incidence of atelectasis in contrast to no therapy cannot be answered, due to the absence of a control group; however, the purpose of our study was to
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Ms. Rachel Knox and Mr. James Stuart for technical assistance.
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Supported by Marion Laboratories.
Manuscript received June 11; revision accepted August 28.