Awareness Among the Patients Under General Anesthesia: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction Unless specifically asked, many patients may be hesitant to discuss their experiences. Some people might not recall what happened right after surgery, but they might remember it 1-2 weeks later. We undertook the current study to estimate the incidence of awareness among patients under general anesthesia (GA). Methodology We conducted a cross-sectional, analytical study for three months. The study included patients who underwent functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS), septoplasty, mastoidectomy, or laparoscopic appendicectomy under general anesthesia. Patients who refused to take part and had low Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores (less than 9) or didn’t meet extubation criteria were all excluded from the study. We used a pre-validated semi-structured questionnaire for data collection. It had two sections. The first one includes demographic details, and the second section contains the modified Brice questionnaire. By using this questionnaire, we classified the patients as A, B, and C. Class A experiences are those that were remembered under anesthesia or surgery and were confirmed or disproved by the attending medical personnel present in the operating room. Class B, which stands for “potential awareness,” was defined as a state in which the patient could not specifically recollect any occurrence that occurred during anesthesia or surgery but could have made connections between memories and the surgical procedure. We define Class C as a lack of recalled intraoperative events with probable memories of scenarios from the immediate pre- or postoperative period. We analyzed the data collected using IBM Corp. Released 2012. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 21.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp. Results About 240 patients took part in this study. Most of the people (68%) were men in the age group of 31 to 50 years. About 2% of the patient’s experience awareness during general anesthesia. Only 2.5% of patients experienced dreaming. The association between awareness and comorbidity was statistically significant (P < 0.001). Conclusion It is about to know that our study results suggest that awareness had an association with comorbidity among the patients undergoing surgery under general anesthesia.