NeuRecipes

About the Book

Patient care is becoming more specialized.  MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) focuses on the care of oncology patients. On the surgical arm of cancer treatment, we have developed special expertise in all the surgical subspecialties. As a result, the anesthesia has also become extremely specialized too. The Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, chaired by Dr. D. L. Brown, has developed a subspecialty practice in the treatment of surgical neurological oncology patients who present for tumor resection: The Neuroanesthesia Team. This book has been written by members of the neuroanesthesia team here at MDACC. These authors are Assistant through full Professors who are clinicians (perform cases daily) and teachers (teach senior anesthesia residents). In addition to our anesthesiologist authors, we have been privileged to have two very prominent full Professors of Neurosurgery involved with the book. Dr. DeMonte has co-edited the entire book as well as the skull base chapter (his area of expertise). Dr. McCutcheon has co-authored the pituitary chapter.

This book is intended to outline our style of executing these anesthetics—that is—our NEURosurgical anesthetic RECIPES. The goal of this manual is to aid the new anesthesia oncology clinician, fellow, or resident in quickly reviewing OUR approach to the neurosurgical cases at MDACC. It is intended only as a guideline and is by no means the only approach to these types of cases.

The manual has three parts. Firstly, it describes anesthesia for craniotomies for tumors; next, for those tumors located in the skull base; and thirdly, it outlines approaches for spine surgery. It is organized in a pre-operative, intra-operative and post-operative format to allow for a quick and easy review.

About the Author

Una Srejic M.D. has been practicing the specialty of anesthesiology as an academic faculty clinician with an interest in neuro-anesthesiology at MD Anderson Cancer Center since 2000. Prior to that she was involved in trauma anesthesia for 2 years.

Born a Canadian, she received her M.D. from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada in 1992, and her specialty boards in Anesthesiology following her training at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston in 1998. She wanted to compile a book which reflects a decade of a very unique practice of neurosurgical anesthesia for brain, skull base and spine tumors in order to be able to share this knowledge in a recipe format with other clinicians around the world as their oncology practices grow. The book was written by members of our subspecialty group: The Neuroanesthesia Team. They range from assistant through full professors. We also had the input of 2 very prominent neurosurgeons: Dr. F. DeMonte (A very established author and full professor of neurosurgery. Skull based surgery is his area of expertise) and Dr. I. McCutcheon (Also a very established author and full professor of neurosurgery. Pituitary surgery is his area of expertise). They have provided unique insight and commentary on their respective areas.