[Effectiveness of intra-articular anesthesia in knee arthroscopy]

Knee arthroscopy is one of the most commonly performed procedures. General anesthesia and spinal blockage are the most common forms of anesthesia. We consider that this surgery can be managed with intra-articular local anesthesia, thus avoiding prolonged stays in recovery, with effective pain management and optimization of presurgical, intrasurgical and post-surgical times.

Prospective, quasi-experimental, longitudinal study to compare two anesthetic procedures: intraarticular anesthesia (lidocaine with epinephrine, bupivacaine and fentanyl) without the use of ischemia (group A); spinal blockage and use of ischemia (group B) by assessing age, surgery time, pain during surgery and 24 hour post-op VA scale, time spent in recovery, need to administer general anesthesia or anesthetic rescue doses, 24-hour range of motion. Student t-test, significance level was used: p 0.05 for nonparametric variables and 2 parametric variables.

38 patients were included per group. The surgical time (45 min vs 39 min, p = 0.03), recovery time (1.9 vs 3 hours, p = 0.0004) were lower in group A, while pain during surgery was greater (17 vs 3%, p = 0.09), without requiring general anesthesia.

The advantages in favor of intraarticular anesthesia were: shortened hospital stays, less pain at 24 hours, safety in its application. Its disadvantage is the possibility of pain during surgery and sedation is sufficient as adjuvant.