Early oral hydration (EOH) has been found to be safe and lessens the occurrence of nausea, hypoxemia and vomiting in children undergoing general anesthesia. It has be helpful in significantly decreasing thirst and improving satisfaction, as concluded from a prospective randomized study in BMC anesthesiology.

This study compared the early and late oral hydration i.e. EOH and DOH in children after general anesthesia in terms of safety and tolerability and hence, improving comfort in these children.

Out of 2000 children relating to American Society of Anesthesiology I-III; 1000 were randomized to EOH group and 1000 to DOH group. The children ingested a small quantity of drinking water (as suggested) following the recovery of swallowing reflex in EOH group. The vital signs of children were checked for 20 minutes in a post-anesthesia care unit. In the DOH group, water was given at 4 hours after use of general anesthesia. Their parameters like satisfaction, thirst, oropharyngeal discomfort, nausea, and vomiting were all examined.

On the whole, the data were assembled from 1770 patients i.e. EOH = 832 and DOH = 938. No hypoxemia was observed in any of the groups, nor did the occurrence of nausea and vomiting vary between these groups (P > 0.05) as observed in the following table 1:

Table 1: Occurrence of post-operative nausea and vomiting in PACU and ward

The thirst score of the EOH group considerably reduced relative to the DOH group in the children >5 years old following drinking for 10 to 20 minutes (P < 0.05).