The aim of this study was to evaluate the incidence of coughing and breath holding in patients undergoing lumbar surgery extubated in prone position, supine position, or supine position with intravenous lidocaine before extubation. About 105 ASA I to II patients undergoing lumbar surgery were extubated in prone position in group P (n = 35), in supine position in group S (n = 35) and in supine p...

Recent advances in Stereotactic Radiosurgery/Conformal Radiotherapy have made it possible to deliver surgically precise radiation therapy to small lesions while preserving the surrounding tissue. However, because of physiologic motion, the application of conformal radiotherapy to extra-cranial tumors is, at present, geared toward slowing the progression of disease rather than obtaining a cure. ...

Cine MRI is used for assessing cardiac function and flow and is typically based on a breath-held, segmented data acquisition. Breath holding is particularly difficult for patients with congestive heart failure or in pediatric cases. Real-time imaging may be used without breath holding or ECG triggering. However, despite the use of rapid imaging sequences and accelerated parallel imaging, real-t...

Background The sensitivity of peripheral chemoreflex is a marker of the severity of heart failure and the prognosis of the outcome in these patients. The assessment of chemosensitivity in these patients remains an actual problem. Objective The aim of the study was to explore the relationship between a Breath-Holding Test (BHT) and single-breath carbon dioxide test and to evaluate the reliabil...

EVERY medical student and, indeed, every schoolboy knows that it is possible to hold the breath for a longer time with lungs fully inflated than at a smaller lung volume, and that the breath-holding time can also be prolonged by hyperventilation beforehand. This prolongation is possible because the onset of the unpleasant sensations which arise during breath-holding is delayed. Thus both mechan...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the work was to estimate the dose received by the heart throughout a course of breath-holding breast radiotherapy. METHODS 113 cone-beam CT (CBCT) scans were acquired for 20 patients treated within the HeartSpare 1A study, in which both an active breathing control (ABC) device and a voluntary breath-hold (VBH) method were used. Predicted mean heart doses were obtained...

Twelve subjects without and ten subjects with diving experience performed short diving-related interventions. After labeling of erythrocytes, scintigraphic measurements were continuously performed during these interventions. All interventions elicited a graduated and reproducible splenic contraction, depending on the type, severity, and duration of the interventions. The splenic contraction var...

To determine the characteristics of and mechanisms causing the bradycardia during sleep apnea (SA), both patients with SA and normals were studied. Evaluation of six consecutive SA patients demonstrated that bradycardia occurred during 95% of all apneas (central, obstructive, and mixed) and became marked with increased apnea length (P less than 0.01) and increased oxyhemoglobin desaturation (P ...

Breath-holding techniques reduce the amount of radiation received by cardiac structures during tangential-field left breast radiotherapy. With these techniques, patients hold their breath while radiotherapy is delivered, pushing the heart down and away from the radiotherapy field. Despite clear dosimetric benefits, these techniques are not yet in widespread use. One reason for this is that comm...