Intravenous versus inhalation anaesthesia for one-lung ventilation.

This is an update of a Cochrane Review first published in The Cochrane Library, Issue 2, 2008.The technique called one-lung ventilation can confine bleeding or infection to one lung, prevent rupture of a lung cyst or, more commonly, facilitate surgical exposure of the unventilated lung. During one-lung ventilation, anaesthesia is maintained either by delivering an inhalation anaesthetic to the ventilated lung or by infusing an intravenous anaesthetic. It is possible that the method chosen to maintain anaesthesia may affect patient outcomes. Inhalation anaesthetics may impair hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction (HPV) and increase intrapulmonary shunt and hypoxaemia.