Lead author Dr. Yoo and colleagues from the Departments of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine Surgery, Seoul National University Hospital and the Cancer Research Institute, Seoul National University, South Korea, examined the potential association between the type of anesthesia used and recurrence of cancer in a retrospective cohort study that compared the impact of total IV anesthesia and inhalation anesthesia on the primary outcome—recurrence-free survival after breast cancer surgery.

Using electronic medical records of patients who had breast cancer surgery at a tertiary-care teaching hospital, the authors separated patients into groups according to whether inhalation or IV anesthesia was used for surgery and used propensity scores to account for any differences detected in baseline characteristics. The risks of cancer recurrence and all-cause mortality were compared between each type of anesthesia using Kaplan-Meier survival curves, which were designed to evaluate the influence of anesthesia type on recurrence-free survival and overall survival.

Of the 7,678 patients who had breast cancer surgery during the study period, data for only 5,331 patients were available for analysis. Initially, the IV-anesthesia group contained 3,085 patients compared with 2,246 in the inhaled-anesthesia group; however, after propensity-score matching, only 1,766 patients remained in each group. The team evaluated survival curves and found that there was no significant difference in recurrence-free survival or overall survival between the two groups, with 5-year recurrence-free survival rates of 93.2% (95% CI, 91.9-94.5) in the IV group and 93.8% (95% CI, 92.6-95.1) in the inhalation group.

In addition, the researchers noted that the use of inhaled anesthesia had no significant impact on recurrence-free survival (hazard ratio, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.69-1.32; P = .782) or overall survival (hazard ratio, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.69-1.33; P = .805) compared with total IV anesthesia. The study authors concluded that there was no association between type of anesthesia used and the long-term prognosis of breast cancer.

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