Background: Airway management is often considered one of the most challenging tasks encountered in anaesthesia practice. When a conventionally trained anesthesiologist experiences difficulty with mask ventilation of upper airway or difficulty with intubation, it is termed difficult airway²³. Any failure to intubate the trachea can cause morbidity and is the leading cause of mortality in anaesthesia. The incidence of failed intubation is 0.13-0.3% in the operating rooms²⁴.

Objective: to compare the overall success of intubation in King Vision and Endolite groups, in difficult airway management and also compare number of attempts taken for intubation and time taken for intubation.

Methods: this is a study of randomized comparative study, with sixty patients with predicted difficult airway are recruited into the study. The patients are randomly allotted into group KV and group EL with 30 patients in each group. A standard anaesthesia technique is employed to intubate the patients. The overall success of intubation of each device is noted. Along with it success at first attempt, time taken for intubation and optimization maneuvers are noted and analysed.

Results: Data of sixty patients are analysed. The overall success of intubation by both devices is 100%. However, the success at first attempt in KV group was 96.66%(29/30), and that of EL group was 73.33%(22/30). The p-value was 0.026 and was said to be statistically significant. The time taken for intubation in this study was 22.44± 3.74 s in KV group and 22.9±4.18 s in EL group, the p-value was 0.65.

Conclusion: this study demonstrated that both king vision laryngoscope and endo lite stylet can be safely used in patients with difficult airway. Endo lite has taken mare number of attempts to intubate than king vision, because of the inherent semiblind technique of intubation. There is no significant difference in intubation time between both the groups.

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Dr Kota Mythili

Post graduate, Department of Anesthesiology, Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatnam