Comparison of Postoperative Throat and Neck Complaints after the Use of the i-Gel versus the Traditional Laryngeal Mask

Abstract

Introduction: One of the most important jobs of an anesthesiology is to preserve an adequate gaseous exchange. With the coming in the 80’s of the laryngeal mask airway, a less invasive technique was introduced for this end. There are a lot of variants of these supraglotic issues, being the i-gel a no inflate mask; witch principle is to provide a perilaryngel stamp that reduced the incidence of sore throat, cervical pain compared with the traditional laryngeal mask. Method: A group of 121 ASA I-II patients with general anesthesia administration, where divided in two groups, one of 60 patients where a traditional laryngeal mask airway was used, and a second group of 61 patients where an i-gel mask was used. In both groups the presence of postoperative sore throat, cervical pain and dysphonia; number of attempts and pressure in the airway tract was measured. Results: The group of patients where the i-gel was used present lower incidence of sore throat (11% vs 27%) and cervical pain (3% vs 9%) and lower values of pressure on the airway tract compared with the group in which the conventional laryngeal mask was used. On the other hand there was no difference in the presence of dysphonia, trauma or number of attempts used to insert the mask. Conclusions: The i-gel larygeal mask demonstrated to be a safe issue, with low incidence of morbidity to administrated general anesthesia.