Cardiac arrest during segmental thoracic epidural anesthesia.

Abstract

AT our institution, thoracic epidural anesthesia (TEA) is being used with increasing frequency to provide surgical anesthesia for breast surgery. 1 Until recently, we have not seen any morbidity associated with this technique. Although profound bradycardia and asystole after spinal anesthesia have been described, 2-10 to our knowledge, there has been no clinical report describing such cardiovascular event after TEA. Therefore, we report a case of postoperative bradycardia and asystole complications TEA performed on a healthy woman for surgical removal of bilateral breast tissue expanders