By Pat Anson, PNN Editor

General anesthesia is just as safe as spinal anesthesia for patients undergoing hip fracture surgery, according to a large new study that dispels a common belief that patients who receive spinal injections have better outcomes.

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania enrolled 1,600 mostly elderly patients having hip fracture surgery at 46 U.S. and Canadian hospitals, and randomly assigned them to receive either spinal or general anesthesia.

They found that rates of survival, delirium and functional recovery post-surgery were similar for patients, regardless of the type of anesthesia they received. The findings are published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Our study argues that, in many cases, either form of anesthesia appears to be safe," said lead investigator Mark D. Neuman, MD, an associate professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Perelman. "This is important because it suggests that choices can be guided by patient preference rather than anticipated differences in outcomes in many cases."

During general anesthesia, inhaled and intravenous medications are used to make patients unconscious, which often requires a breathing tube during surgery. For spinal anesthesia, medications are used to numb the lower part of the body through an injection into the spinal column. Patients anesthetized this way are typically able to breathe on their own during surgery and rarely require a breathing tube.

About 250,000 people have hip fracture surgery annually in the United States. In the past, most would receive general anesthesia, but in recent years the use of spinal anesthesia for hip fracture surgeries has increased significantly, due in part to the belief by some anesthesiologists that it was safer for frail, older patients.  

To get a better idea of possible outcomes associated with both forms form of anesthesia, researchers looked at post-surgical death rates, whether patients regained the ability to walk, and if they experienced any cognitive decline.

Statistically, there was hardly any difference in outcomes between the two groups. Sixty days after surgery, 18.5% of patients assigned to spinal anesthesia had either died or were unable to walk; versus 18 percent of patients who received general anesthesia. About 21 percent of patients assigned to spinal anesthesia experienced delirium, versus 20 percent of those given general anesthesia.

"What our study offers is reassurance that general anesthesia can represent a safe option for hip fracture surgery for many patients," said Neuman. "This is information that patients, families, and clinicians can use together to make the right choice for each patient's personalized care."

Neuman and his research team say previous comparisons of general and spinal anesthesia came from studies that didn’t randomly assign patients, which creates self-selection bias. Some patients may have chosen spinal anesthesia with the goal of avoiding complications, while others opted for general anesthesia to avoid a spinal injection or because they feared inadequate sedation during surgery.

The most common types of medications used during spinal injections are anesthetics, opioids or corticosteroids. A recent study of patients with hip osteoarthritis warned of serious long-term complications for those given steroid injections. Patients who received steroids were 8.5 times more likely to develop rapidly destructive hip disease, a condition that causes the loss of blood flow and death of bone tissue in the hip.