Postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) is one of the complex and significant problems in anesthesia practice, with growing trend toward ambulatory and day care surgeries. This review focuses on pathophysiology, pharmacological prophylaxis, and rescue therapy for PONV. We searched the Medline and PubMed database for articles published in English from 1991 to 2014 while writing this review using “postoperative nausea and vomiting, PONV, nausea-vomiting, PONV prophylaxis, and rescue” as keywords. PONV is influenced by multiple factors which are related to the patient, surgery, and pre-, intra-, and post-operative anesthesia factors. The risk of PONV can be assessed using a scoring system such as Apfel simplified scoring system which is based on four independent risk predictors. PONV prophylaxis is administered to patients with medium and high risks based on this scoring system. Newer drugs such as neurokinin-1 receptor antagonist (aprepitant) are used along with serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine subtype 3) receptor antagonist, corticosteroids, anticholinergics, antihistaminics, and butyrophenones for PONV prophylaxis. Combination of drugs from different classes with different mechanism of action are administered for optimized efficacy in adults with moderate risk for PONV. Multimodal approach with combination of pharmacological and nonpharmacological prophylaxis along with interventions that reduce baseline risk is employed in patients with high PONV risk.

Cerebral palsy (CP) refers to a spectrum of nonprogressive neurological disorders with disturbances in posture and movement, resulting from perinatal intrauterine insult to developing infant brain. Many conditions associated with CP require surgery. Such cases pose important gastrointestinal, respiratory, and other perioperative considerations. Anesthetic management in these cases is delicate. Intraoperative complications including hypovolemia, hypothermia, muscle spasms, seizures, and delayed recovery might complicate the anesthetic management. A thorough preanesthetic evaluation allows for a better intra- and post-operative care. Postoperative analgesia is important, particularly in orthopedic surgeries one for pain relief. This review highlights the clinical manifestations in CP and anesthetic considerations in such child presenting for various surgeries.

Anticoagulants remain the primary strategy for the prevention and treatment of thrombosis. Unfractionated heparin, low molecular weight heparin (LMWH), fondaparinux, and warfarin have been studied and employed extensively with direct thrombin inhibitors typically reserved for patients with complications or those requiring interventions. Novel oral anticoagulants have emerged from clinical development and are expected to replace older agents with their ease to use and more favorable pharmacodynamic profiles. Increasingly, anesthesiologists are being requested to anesthetize patients who are on some form of anticoagulants and hence it is important to have sound understanding of pharmacology, dosing, monitoring, and toxicity of anticoagulants. We searched the online databases including PubMed Central, Cochrane, and Google Scholar using anticoagulants, perioperative management, anesthetic considerations, and LMWH as keywords for the articles published between 1994 and 2015 while writing this review. In this article, we will review the different classes of anticoagulants and how to manage them in the perioperative settings.