Anesthesia Pitfalls and Considerations for Spine Surgery

Surgery on the spine and spinal cord involves a wide variety of surgical procedures whose pathologies depend on the age of the patient. For children and teenagers the most common reason to need spine surgery is to either correct spinal deformities or oncologic disease. The pathologies that adult spine patients typically present with are trauma, infection, malignancy causing neurologic compromise, idiopathic spinal deformity, and degenerative disease. This can lead to a wide range of spinal surgeries including minimally invasive decompression procedures to major deformity correction involving osteotomies and major blood loss. These adult patients have a unique set of anesthetic challenges and the goal should be to provide an individualized anesthetic plan to optimize outcomes