Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) in spine surgery: A systematic review

Introduction. In recent years, Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS), or Fast-track, has been actively developed and introduced into clinical practice in many industry of surgery in Europe and the USA. However, the ERAS® Society has not yet approved a unified protocol in spinal neurosurgery, and most of the publications on the topic have appeared only in the last few years.

The purpose of the study is to present a systematic review of the literature to identify the key elements of the ERAS program and the effect of their use, as well as the impact on complications in the following areas of spinal neurosurgery: deformities, trauma, degenerative, infectious and oncology diseases.

Materials and methods. The authors analyzed and systematically reviewed all published literature on ERAS in spine and spinal cord surgery up to October 10, 2020 using the main databases of medical literature and search resources PubMed and eLibrary according to the PICOS inclusion and exclusion criteria, as well as the recommendations of the protocol for writing systematic reviews. and PRISMA meta-analyses.

Results. We analyzed 13 articles considering the use of ERAS technology in surgery for deformities (n = 3), degenerative (n = 8) and tumor (n = 2) lesions of the spine. The level of evidence of the study is 2a. The publications contain information on the treatment of 2,777 patients, whose average age was 50.5 years (from 14.0 to 72.4 years). The ERAS protocol has been implemented in clinics in the USA (46 %), China (30 %), France (8 %), Russia (8 %) and Great Britain (8 %). The average number of key elements of the ERAS program was 13.7 (range 5 to 24). The most popular are: preoperative patient counseling and education, minimally invasive surgery, multimodal analgesia, early mobilization and enteral loading, as well as active follow-up and care. The introduction of the ERAS protocol in spinal surgery made it possible, compared with the control group, to reduce the duration of hospitalization by 1.8 days (from 0.17 to 3.2 days), the cost of treatment by $ 1,443.75 (from 146 to $ 3,444), the severity of pain syndrome and the use of opioids in 38 % of cases, the consumption of antiemetics after surgery, as well as the time of surgery and blood loss at 29 minutes and 188 ml, respectively. For ERAS-groups, cardiovascular and respiratory complications are more typical, and for control groups – urinary, infectious, thromboembolic complications and liquorrhea. In general, there is a decrease in the total number of complications by 8.5 % (from 2.3 to 9.6 %).

Conclusions. Enhanced recovery after surgery is a promising technology for improving the quality of care for patients in spine surgery.

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