Indian Journal of Clinical Anaesthesia

Despite of prophylaxis, nausea or vomiting is most common in the postoperative period, may leads to unanticipated readmission, prolonged hospital stay and patient's frustration. Earlier studies have reported conflicting results of dextrose on postoperative nausea and vomiting hence we designed this study.

Testing the role of intravenous 5% dextrose on reducing the frequency of postoperative nausea and vomiting.

A prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

In this study, we allocated 90 healthy patients scheduled for tympanoplasty under general anesthesia. The participants were randomized into two groups (n=45) to receive either Ringer's lactate solution (group C) or 5% dextrose in Ringer's lactate solution (group D) intravenously following surgery. A standard technique was applied for general anesthesia in all patients and single dose of ondansetron 4 mg was given intravenously half-hour before recovery from anesthesia. Postoperative nausea and vomiting scores, antiemetic doses were recorded at 0, 30, 60, 90, 120 min and 24 hours. The duration of stay in post-anesthesia care unit was also noted. The data recorded were analyzed using student t-test and chi-square test. A value of P <0.05 was considered as significant and 0.0001 was considered as extremely significant.

Postoperative nausea and vomiting scores were not different between the groups and non-significant statistically (P >0.05). Conversely, patients in group D consumed less antiemetic doses (P = 0.004), and had a short duration of stay in the postanesthesia care unit (P<0.0001) when compared with patients in group C.

In this study, postoperative dextrose 5% intravenous infusion resulted in improved postoperative emesis management as explained by decrease in rescue antiemetic consumption and post-anesthesia care unit duration of stay.