Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-20-2016

Abstract

Study Objective

Midazolam has been found to have beneficial effects on anxiety in children in the preoperative setting. Prior studies have examined various postoperative behaviors of children, but little research has examined the effects of preoperative use of midazolam with postoperative sleep. The purpose of this investigation was to compare postoperative sleep in children as a function of preoperative sedative medication use.

Design

This study was a 2-group randomized controlled trial.

Setting

Participants were recruited from Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital.

Patients

Participants included a convenience sample of 70 children between the ages of 3 to 12 years undergoing ambulatory tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy.

Interventions

Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: a control group who received preoperative acetaminophen only (n = 32) and an experimental group who received both acetaminophen and midazolam preoperatively (n = 38).

Measurements

Parents completed measures of postoperative behavioral recovery and a subset of children wore actigraphs to examine objective sleep data.

Main Results

Children who received midazolam experienced similar sleep changes compared to children in the control group. The actigraph data revealed that children who received midazolam were awake significantly less during the night compared to the control group (P= .01).

Conclusion

Children who received midazolam before surgery had similar postoperative sleep changes compared to children who did not receive midazolam. Further understanding of the postoperative behavioral effects of midazolam on children will help guide healthcare providers in their practice.

Comments

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Clinical Anesthesia. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Clinical Anesthesia, volume 30, in 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclinane.2015.11.011

The Creative Commons license below applies only to this version of the article.

Copyright

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.