Novel use of an exchange catheter to facilitate intubation with an Aintree catheter in a tall patient with a predicted difficult airway: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>The Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) has been shown to successfully facilitate difficult intubations when other methods have failed. The Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) has a fixed length of 56 cm, and it has been suggested in the literature that it may be too short for safe use in patients who are tall.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We present the case of a 32-year-old, 180 cm tall Caucasian woman with a predicted difficult airway who presented to our facility for an emergency cesarean section. After several failed intubation attempts via direct laryngoscopy, an airway was established with a laryngeal mask airway. After delivery of a healthy baby, our patient's condition necessitated tracheal intubation. A fiber-optic bronchoscope loaded with an Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) was passed through the laryngeal mask airway into the trachea until just above the carina, but was too short to safely allow for the passage of an endotracheal tube.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We present a novel technique in which the Aintree intubating catheter (Cook^®Medical Inc., Bloomington, IN, USA) was replaced with a longer (100 cm) exchange catheter, over which an endotracheal tube was passed successfully into the trachea.</p

Anesthetic experience using total intra-venous anesthesia for a patient with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome -A case report-

We present here the case of a 33-month-old male patient with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome (WHS) and who underwent tympanoplasty and myringotomy. WHS is caused by a rare chromosomal abnormality, which is the deletion of the short arm of chromosome number 4. The typical craniofacial features of WHS patients such as micrognathia, microcephaly and the muscular weakness can make using neuromuscular blocking agents and performing intubation difficult. Moreover, there are a few previous case reports showing that malignant hyperthermia occurred during and after an operation in which the anesthesia was done with inhalation agents, so special anesthetic care is needed when operating on a WHS patient. By carefully intubating the patient and using total intravenous anesthesia, we performed successful anesthesia without any complications. We describe here the anesthetic management of a WHS patient and we review the relevant literature