Recovery after General Anaesthesia in Adult Horses: A Structured Summary of the Literature

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Recovery is the most dangerous phase of general anaesthesia in horses. Numerous publications have reported about this phase, but structured reviews that try to reduce the risk of bias of narrative reviews/expert opinions, focussing on the topic are missing. Therefore, the aim of the present article was to publish the first structured review as a summary of the literature focussing on the recovery phase after general anaesthesia in horses. The objective was to summarise the available literature, taking into account the scientific evidence of the individual studies. A structured approach was followed with two experts in the field independently deciding on article inclusion and its level of scientific evidence. A total number of 444 articles, sorted by topics and classified based on their levels of evidence, were finally included into the present summary. The most important findings were summarised and discussed. The present structured review can be used as a compilation of the publications that, to date, focus on the recovery phase after general anaesthesia in adult horses. This type of review tries to minimise the risk of bias inherent to narrative reviews/expert opinions. ABSTRACT: Recovery remains the most dangerous phase of general anaesthesia in horses. The objective of this publication was to perform a structured literature review including levels of evidence (LoE) of each study with the keywords “recovery anaesthesia horse”, entered at once, in the search browsers PubMed and Web of Science. The two authors independently evaluated each candidate article. A final list with 444 articles was obtained on 5 April 2021, classified as: 41 “narrative reviews/expert opinions”, 16 “retrospective outcome studies”, 5 “surveys”, 59 “premedication/sedation and induction drugs”, 27 “maintenance with inhalant agents”, 55 “maintenance with total intravenous anaesthesia (TIVA)”, 3 “TIVA versus inhalants”, 56 “maintenance with partial intravenous anaesthesia (PIVA)”, 27 “other drugs used during maintenance”, 18 “drugs before/during recovery”, 18 “recovery systems”, 21 “respiratory system in recovery”, 41 “other factors”, 51 “case series/reports” and 6 “systems to score recoveries”. Of them, 167 were LoE 1, 36 LoE 2, 33 LoE 3, 110 LoE 4, 90 LoE 5 and 8 could not be classified based on the available abstract. This review can be used as an up-to-date compilation of the literature about recovery after general anaesthesia in adult horses that tried to minimise the bias inherent to narrative reviews.