Plastic surgery providers have long known the maximum time a patient should stay under anesthesia is five or six hours. And that’s only for patients who have had an EKG, blood tests and other tests to be officially healthy enough for any surgery.
But now, a group of plastic surgeons, writing in an April, 2014 issue of the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, a professional magazine for plastic surgeons, have found that complications start to increase after a patients has been “under” for three hours.
Typical complications of cosmetic plastic surgery procedures include excess bleeding, blood clots, bruising, infection, numbness and excessive scarring.
Along with nine colleagues, Jeffrey M. Kenkel, M.D., of the department of plastic surgery at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center also wondered how time under anesthesia affects complications.
So they studied the medical charts of 1801 complex plastic surgery procedures on 1,753 patients from January 2008 to January 2012.
The study aimed to find to find the point after which complications started to rise.
Looking at the study group overall, they saw that 27.8 percent of cases had complications. About 75 percent of the study group had about five cosmetic plastic surgery procedures in a single surgical session, meaning the patient was under anesthesia longer.
(Read more about modern anesthesia in plastic surgery.)
When the plastic surgeons ran the data, they found the optimum limit for a plastic surgery patient to be under anesthesia was 3.1 hours.
Each hour longer than that was associated with a 21 percent increase in the odds of having complications.
After 4.5 and 6.8 hours, the odds of complications increased even more.
(Read the plastic surgery study.)
The study concluded that the duration of a plastic surgery operation is a predictor of complications, with significantly increased risk over three hours under anesthesia.
How to cope? It’s now more important than ever to select a plastic surgeon with as much experience as possible.
In the case of a rhinoplasty, a beginning surgeon is slower and may take several hours or longer to complete the procedure. But a Master Surgeon with 20 years experience can perform the same surgery in 45 minutes because he or she works more efficiently.
You’ll also recover faster with the Master Surgeon because less tissue is disturbed so bruising, bleeding and other complications are held to a minimum.
(Learn what happens before a nose job.)
