Cases that use inhalant anesthesia

Tatiana Henriques Ferreira, DVM, PhD, MSc, DACVAA, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, and Marlis Rezende, DVM, PhD, MSc, DACVAA, an associate professor of anesthesia and analgesia at Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biological Sciences in Fort Collins, co-presented a lecture on inhalant anesthesia vs total intravenous anesthesia (TIVA) at the 2025 North American Veterinary Community (NAVC) SkillShop in Orlando, Florida. In a dvm360 interview, they discussed cases that commonly use inhalant anesthesia.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

Tatiana Henriques Ferreira, DVM, PhD, MSc, DACVAA: You really can do inhalant anesthesia for any procedure, but you just have to keep in mind that inhalant anesthetics can lead to some negative effects on some body systems. And in the example of the neuro patients, when you worry about intracranial pressure, you could think about mitigating some of those negative effects by keeping the inhaling anesthetics low, like below Mac values. And this would mitigate some of those side effects.

Marlis Rezende, DVM, PhD, MSc, DACVAA: And controlling CO2.

Henriques Ferreira: And controlling CO2, so that’ the same thing.

Rezende: Perhaps a little bit more aggressive in the case of inhalants, then you have to be with TIVA. But yeah, we can do those two.

Henriques Ferreira: Yes.

Rezende: And the other case you mentioned, it's probably…not as common, would be craniotomies. We do those, brain surgery, with TIVA. But a lot of like our brains, we do them on inhalant too, if they are not particularly affected…We oftentimes do them on inhalant, doing those things like ventilating them, keeping their CO2 on the end tidal CO2 around 32-35, and sometimes using a [constant rate infusion] of propofol or opioid to sort of make sure that the concentration of ISO stays low. So we do those with inhalants too. So it's not like you have to use TIVA, but that would be probably one of the scenarios where TIVA would be the most beneficial.