Anesthesiologist intervention during cataract surgery under topical or peribulbar anesthesia: a propensity model comparison

Cataract surgery is one of the most frequent surgical procedures on elderly patients in industrialized countries (1, 2). It was traditionally performed under peribulbar anesthesia (PA), but during the last 2 decades improvement in surgical techniques (3-13) boosted the use of topical anesthesia (TA) for cataract surgery. Although some limitations of TA in comparison with PA have been described (14, 15), several works provided evidence that TA is a valid alternative to PA for cataract surgery (1619). Adequate pain control, short recovery time, and good safety profile make TA an appealing technique for daysurgery phacoemulsification under monitored anesthesia care. In this setting, cost-effectiveness may be improved as perioperative monitoring is provided by nurses and the anesthesiologist is immediately available on an on-call basis (monitored anesthesia care). We studied data from a prospectively collected database of patients submitted to cataract surgery under monitored Anesthesiologist intervention during cataract surgery under topical or peribulbar anesthesia: a propensity model comparison