What is the preoperative fasting period?

People will encounter some diseases in their lives, but major diseases rarely occur. However, once a disease that requires surgical treatment occurs, you must pay attention to some factors. The preoperative fasting and drinking time is one of the factors that people should pay attention to, because some surgeries cannot be treated with certain foods, but many people don’t know how to arrange it. So, what is the preoperative fasting period?

First, what is the preoperative fasting and abstention period? The traditional fasting and abstention period for elective surgery is to reduce the volume and acidity of gastric contents and prevent vomiting and aspiration during anesthesia. At present, most hospitals in my country still follow the traditional concept in surgical textbooks: adult patients undergoing elective surgery should fast for 8 to 12 hours and refrain from drinking for 4 hours before surgery. This traditional method of fasting and abstaining from drinking neither achieves the effect of an empty stomach nor takes into account the time it takes for clear liquids and solid food to be emptied from the stomach, so that patients often experience adverse reactions such as thirst, hunger, anxiety, dehydration, and hypoglycemia. However, in actual work, due to various reasons from both the doctor and the patient side, the fasting and abstinence time may be longer than the standard time.

Second, the physical and psychological harm that long-term fasting brings to patients cannot be ignored. New fasting times Modern physiological research has found that different foods are emptying at different speeds. Water is emptied the fastest, with about 95% of it being emptied from the stomach 1 hour after ingestion; the second fastest is solid food, which needs to be converted into liquid form before it can be emptied, although a lot of evidence shows that shortening the preoperative fasting time is safe and beneficial. However, due to the lack of authoritative guidelines in China, most hospitals still implement traditional fasting plans in clinical practice[3]. Therefore, it is important to train medical staff in evidence-based knowledge and skills on preoperative fasting. At the same time, it is necessary to unify the understanding of this concept among ward nurses, surgeons, anesthesiologists and operating room nurses in various hospitals to avoid patients' doubts about different educational contents.

What is the preoperative fasting period? A clinical quality review project showed that the current preoperative fasting period for patients is too long, suggesting that the current practice is not based on best evidence, but rather continues to use routine methods based on the convenience of ward management1. (Level 5) Other reasons for patients to fast for a longer period of time before surgery include lack of knowledge, inconsistent practices, and insufficient expertise of medical staff2. (Level5) A study showed that patients fasted for too long, with an average of 11.94 hours. This study used action research methods to carry out health education on fasting and not drinking before surgery for medical staff in the ward, and required anesthesiologists to clearly specify the last time a patient could eat or drink before surgery. After the program was implemented, the results showed that the average fasting and abstinence time of patients was reduced to 5.4 hours3. (Level 3)