PhD Student Tsumara Awarded Grant for AANA Foundation Proposal

Congratulations to Hideyo Tsumura, PhD student, and her faculty sponsors/mentors, Associate Professors Wei Pan and Debra Brandon and Charles Vacchiano, professor emeritus, for receiving a general research grant for Tsumura's AANA (American Association of Nurse Anesthetists) Foundation proposal,"Characteristics and Predictive Factors of Postoperative Pulmonary Complications (PPCs) Following General Anesthesia with Mechanical Ventilation." This award is for a one-year period, awarded July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021. This project was awarded at $72,040.75.

One in five patients who develop a postoperative pulmonary complication (PPC) dies within 30 days. Known PPC risk factors are attributable to patient factors (e.g., age, obesity), surgical factors (e.g., procedure duration, emergency status) and anesthesia factors (e.g., general anesthesia, mechanical ventilation). Specifically, ventilator induced lung injury (VILI) secondary to intraoperative mechanical ventilation is highly associated with incidence of PPC. Individualization of intraoperative ventilatory strategy is a potential solution to fill the gap for whom-when-and-how LPV can optimize surgical patient outcomes. The overarching goal of this proposed study is to examine the interactions between PPC risk stratifications and intraoperative LPV strategy to identify optimal individualized care based on patient, surgical, and anesthesia characteristics. We are proposing to conduct a retrospective study to examine intraoperative ventilatory parameters against PPC risk factors. We will utilize a case-controlled design with continuous exposure to generate hypothesis for causal relationships between PPCs and individualized ventilatory parameters. Our study population is adult surgical patients who underwent general anesthesia with mechanical ventilation excluding cardiothoracic and obstetric surgeries at Duke University Health System since 2016.