Airway Management in the Lateral Position: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
UNLABELLED: It may be required to ensure patency of the airway in the lateral position in certain circumstances. We performed a prospective randomized clinical trial investigating the effects of left lateral patient positioning on airway anatomy and subsequent airway management. Laryngoscopic airway examination was performed in anesthetized patients, in the supine and left lateral positions, and in the presence and absence of cricoid pressure. Patients were randomized to airway management via an endotracheal tube or laryngeal mask airway (LMA). The left lateral position resulted in a deterioration of laryngoscopic view in 35% of patients and improvement in none. In the lateral position, failure of airway management occurred in more patients with the endotracheal tube versus LMA (8 of 39 versus 1 of 30; P = 0.03), and the mean time to successful completion of airway management was longer with tracheal intubation compared with the LMA (39 +/- 19 s versus 26 +/- 12 s; P = 0.002). LMA use results in more reliable airway control compared to tracheal intubation in the lateral position. The LMA should be considered as the primary airway device when instituting airway management in this position. IMPLICATIONS: Inadequate airway management may be fatal. There are recommendations for airway difficulties, but the evidence favoring any specific strategy is limited. This study suggests that, in the lateral position, a laryngeal mask airway more rapidly and reliably establishes airway control than attempts at endotracheal intubation. It further suggests that placing a patient with an inadequate airway into the lateral position will hinder, not help, airway management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".