Abstract
Background: Almost a quarter of the anesthetic procedures currently performed in children involve regional anesthesia. In turn, caudal block (CB) is one of the most widely used techniques in pediatric patients undergoing subumbilical interventions.
Aim: Through an integrative literature review, to synthesize and evaluate the use of BC in pediatric inguinal surgeries.
Method: This is an exploratory study, based on the method of literature review with evidence synthesis. The database chosen for the selection of works was PUBMED, using the following search strategy: (caudal[title] AND block[title]) AND inguinal[title] AND (pediatric OR pediatric).
Results: The search was carried out in November 2022, and initially 13 studies were identified that met the aforementioned search strategy. After reading the titles and abstracts, no paper was excluded.
Conclusion: In general, CB with bupivacaine proved to be a safe and applicable technique in pediatric inguinal surgeries, promoting good analgesia and showing few adverse effects. In addition, the use of CB with bupivacaine in association with tramadol demonstrated safety, in addition to promoting prolonged analgesia. Furthermore, the use of BC in association with dexamethasone, 2-chloroprocaine and levobupivacaine as main anesthetics were positively evaluated. However, when compared to paravertebral block, analgesic infiltration directly into the wound, quadratus lumborum block and transversus abdominis plane block, CB was considered inferior in terms of analgesia duration and pain scores. Finally, BC was superior in terms of analgesia when compared to the use of paracetamol suppository, in addition to analgesia comparable to ultrasound-guided ilioinguinal analgesia.
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