Pre-Anesthetic Assessment in Cataract Surgery at the Yaoundé Gynaeco-Obstetric and Paediatric Hospital -Cameroon

Introduction:A pre-anesthetic assessment is usually required during cataract surgery, the leading cause of curable blindness.To this end, we wanted to know the contribution of this assessment to patients undergoing cataract surgery at the Yaound Gynaeco-Obstetric and Paediatric Hospital (HGOPY).Methodology: Descriptive, retrospective, and cross sectional study, carried out from January 15 to April 30, 2022, at HGOPY.All patients who underwent cataract surgery at HGOPY between 2016 and 2020 were included in our study.The variables of interest were age, sex, medical and surgical history, clinical characteristics of the cataract, paraclinical examinations and results, ASA classification and type of anesthesia recommended.The data was analyzed by IBM-SPSS software version 25.0. Results:We recruited 250 surgical patient files.The sex ratio was 0.78 for 56% women.The average age was 5821 years; 66.34% of patients had a chronic pathology including diabetes (41%) and high blood pressure (39.5%).The proportion of abnormal investigation results was 10% for blood laboratory tests (blood count, prothrombin time, urea/creatinine, fasting blood sugar), 6% for electrocardiogram and 4% for chest X-ray.One hundred and thirty patients (63%) were classified ASA2 followed by 71 (35%) ASA1 patients.Loco-regional anesthesia was the most used type and the cost of a complete pre-anesthetic assessment was estimated at 37,650 CFA francs (58 euros), approximately a quarter of the overall cost. Conclusion:Our work confirms that pre-anesthetic assessment is useful for screening for unrecognized comorbidities or unstable clinical conditions; however, it can be minimized depending on the clinical status in adult patients.