Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Perioperative Medicine
Date Submitted: Jun 4, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 6, 2018 - Aug 3, 2018
Date Accepted: Nov 28, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Trendelenburg Position and Cognitive Decline: A Case-Control Interventional Study Involving Healthy Volunteers
Background:
Postoperative cognitive decline (POCD) is defined as a new cognitive impairment arising after a surgical intervention. Aspects of cognitive function can be assessed using various validated cognitive function tests including the N-back task, the Stroop task, and the lexical decision-making task (LDT). There is some concern that prolonged Trendelenburg positioning during laparoscopic colorectal surgery may cause POCD.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to assess the effect of time spent in the Trendelenburg position on cognitive function.
Methods:
Volunteers were placed in the Trendelenburg position for 3 hours and, then, supine for 30 minutes. Validated cognitive function tests including 1-, 2-, and 3-back tasks, Stroop test, and LDT were performed at baseline and every 30 minutes after Trendelenburg positioning. Cognitive decline was defined per the International Study of Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunction trial: a decrease in accuracy from the volunteers’ baseline or an increase in response time from the volunteers’ baseline by >2 control group SDs.
Results:
We recruited 15 healthy volunteers (8 males, 7 females) with an average age of 69 years (range 57-81) and average body mass index of 27.7 kg/m2 (range 20.9-33). Accuracy remained within 2 SDs at all time points. An increase in response time did occur, and of 15 participants, 3 (20%) showed cognitive decline in the Trendelenburg position after 30 minutes, 4 (27%) after 1 hour, 5 (33%) after 90 minutes, 4 (27%) after 120 and 150 minutes, and 6 (40%) after 180 minutes. On moving to a supine position, 33% (5/15) participants showed cognitive decline.
Conclusions:
The results of this study indicate that Trendelenburg positioning leads to cognitive decline. This may have implications for patients undergoing prolonged Trendelenburg positioning during laparoscopic colorectal surgery.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.