[Urapidil for treatment of postanesthetic shivering following general anesthesia. A placebo controlled pilot study]

Postanaesthetic shivering is common during recovery from general anaesthesia. Therefore we studied whether urapidil suppresses postanaesthetic shivering.

With written informed consent and approval of the local ethics committee, patients (ASA I-II) recovering from general anaesthesia were monitored for 1 h. Patients with continuous shivering for a period of 5 min were randomly treated either with 5 ml placebo (isotonic saline) or 25 mg urapidil in a double-blind trial. This treatment procedure was repeated if shivering did not stop. A complete suppression of shivering was appraised as a sufficient treatment.

Shivering occurred in 20 of the patients studied and urapidil stopped shivering in 7 out of the 10 treated patients, whereas the placebo stopped shivering in only 2 out of 10 patients (P < 0.05).

In a placebo controlled trial, it was demonstrated that postanaesthetic shivering can be successfully treated by urapidil in 70% of the patients.