A Pilot Study of the Effects of 4 vs 3 Hours of Preoperative Fasting in Breast-feeding Infants

Since the publication of several studies indicating that many children are subjected to unnecessarily long fasting waiting for surgery, there is great interest within the pediatric anesthesia community to understand gastric emptying to be able to revise existing guidelines. The new recommendation from ESAIC is that breast-feeding should be encouraged until 3 hours before anesthesia. This recommendation was based mainly on gastric emptying studies in neonates with small sample sizes and single center experience.To address the lack of high quality evidence for this recommendation, the task force plans to perform a multicenter RCT comparing 4 vs 3 hours of preoperative fasting for breast milk.

Twenty infants scheduled for elective surgery or procedures requiring general anesthesia or sedation will be recruited for this randomized controlled pilot study.

Based on the randomization, they are then asked to breast-feed (or bottle-feed with breast-milk) the child at 4 or 3 hours before the scheduled anesthesia induction.

On arrival to the operating room, the gastric ultrasound examination will be performed for analysis of the gastric antrum CSA. After i.v. or inhalational anesthesia, an oro-gastric catheter will be inserted and any residual gastric contents are aspirated when rotating the infant from supine to semi-prone right and left positions. The volume and color of the aspirate will be recorded.

The aim of the present pilot-study is to provide data for sample size calculation and feasibility for the multicenter trial.