Conditions: Nausea Vomiting
Keywords: Post-operative Nausea and Vomiting (PONV)
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 115
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
Recent evidence suggests multiple drug therapy is superior to single agents. The study compares the incidence of nausea, vomiting, need for rescue medication, prolonged PACU time, and unplanned hospital admission in patients with high risk for PONV treated with oral aprepitant with or without transdermal scopolamine preoperatively.

Detailed description:
Postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) is a serious problem complicating surgery. PONV has an overall incidence of 30% and a 70% incidence in high-risk patients. PONV yields unplanned hospital admission, pulmonary aspiration, esophageal rupture, electrolyte abnormalities, dehydration, and delayed discharge from the postanesthesia care unit (PACU). Additional use of resources costs the health care industry hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Patient satisfaction is greatly improved when PONV is prevented.4 PONV etiology is multifactorial and the treatment is multimodal.

Arms:
arm 1: Oral Aprepitant pill and placebo transdermal patch at least 1 hour prior to surgical procedure.

Emend (Aprepitant) + Placebo arm 2: Oral Aprepitant pill and Scopolamine transdermal patch at least 1 hour prior to surgical procedure.

Interventions: intervention 1: Aprepitant intervention 2: Scopolamine
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: 40mg tablet intervention 2: 1.5 mg patch delivering transdermally in vivo approx. 1.0mg over 3 days

Protocol document: