Discussion
hypoxemia, visceral pain, fatigue, pain
ADVERSE EVENTS, COMPLICATIONS
This study demonstrates that butorphanol results in a statistically lower incidence of visceral pain after surgery and reduced propofol consumption for gastrointestinal endoscopy without noticeable fluctuations in circulatory and respiratory functions. Intravenous butorphanol neither prolongs recovery time nor increases adverse events.First, we selected 10 μg/kg butorphanol as the administration dosage in this study. One reason is that the patients had minimal discomfort at this dose in our pretest. The other is that 9.07 μg/kg of butorphanol was more effective than sufentanil for gastrointestinal endoscopy sedation and notably reduced the recovery time [The incidence of visceral pain was significantly lower in the butorphanol group at 10, 20, and 30 min after recovery. This is consistent with most previous studies [Butorphanol infusion allowed for a noticeable reduction in propofol consumption, which was more pronounced in colonoscopy than in gastro-colonoscopy. This may be because of the prolonged operation time in gastro-colonoscopy. Forster and colleagues found similar outcomes for lidocaine: lidocaine resulted in a 50% reduction in propofol dose requirements during colonoscopy and significantly lower postcolonoscopy pain and fatigue [The incidence of hypoxemia was between 8.2% and 15% [Our study should be interpreted with several limitations. As mentioned earlier, the high dosage of butorphanol (10 μg/kg) makes it difficult to find significant differences in the incidence of complications. We should conduct more research on the dosage of butorphanol. Finally, we recorded the total propofol consumption, so it is unclear which stage (the induction of sedation or during the infusion of study medications) caused the increase in the propofol dosage.In conclusion, butorphanol decreases the incidence of visceral pain and propofol consumption for gastrointestinal endoscopy with minimal fluctuations in circulatory and respiratory functions. However, the rate of adverse events and recovery time did not differ significantly after the use of butorphanol. The clinical application needs to be weighed according to the actual situation of the patients.