Basma Mohamed, MBChB, assistant professor of anesthesiology, had the opportunity to be involved in a task force that contributed to five new sets of evidence-based clinical guidelines for preoperative care and treatment of patients undergoing spine surgery.
The guidelines, which were published in the journal Neurosurgery in September, were funded by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons and the AANS/CNS Joint Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves. Based on systematic reviews, the guidelines cover preoperative osteoporosis assessment, preoperative nutritional assessment, preoperative pulmonary evaluation and optimization, preoperative opioid evaluation, and preoperative surgical risk assessment.
Mohamed was invited to participate in the initiative by Daniel J. Hoh, M.D., the co-chair of the task force for this set of guidelines and a professor of neurosurgery at UF.
“I was fortunate that the main topic of those guidelines was preoperative care for spine surgery patients,” said Mohamed, who has written several recent papers on perioperative considerations for patients with spine disease. “It was a great experience to collaborate with the neurosurgeons to create this set of guidelines.”