Patterns and Risk Factors Associated with Postoperative Nausea and Vomiting Among Surgical Patients

Abstract

Background: Postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) is a frequent complication of surgery and anesthesia that may negatively impact comfort and early recovery. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and pattern of PONV and identify patient-, anesthetic-, and surgery-related factors independently associated with its occurrence. Methods: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study conducted on 180 adults who were undergoing elective/emergency surgery under general or regional anesthesia for 6 months. Data were collected by patient interviews, anesthesia records, and hospital records on a structured form and included all the demographic, clinical, anesthetic, surgical, and postoperative data. Nausea and vomiting within the first 24 hours of surgery were recorded. SPSS version 26.0 was used for statistics, association tests and multivariable logistic regression to identify risk factors independently associated with PONV and a p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The mean age was 45.9 ± 14.7 years, and 55.6% were female. Overall, 37.8% developed PONV, of which 21.7% suffered from nausea alone, 6.1% from vomiting alone, and 10.0% from both. Independent predictors were previous PONV (aOR=3.24; p=0.002), female sex (aOR=2.89; p=0.001), general anesthesia (aOR=2.71; p=0.008), postoperative opioid use (aOR=2.58; p=0.004), surgery duration ≥2 hours (aOR=2.36; p=0.011), and non-smoking status (aOR=2.14; p=0.047). Conclusion: More than one-third of patients experienced PONV, and factors were identified which were affecting PONV. Optimized anesthetic care, opioid-sparing analgesia, and risk-based antiemetic prophylaxis can lower the risk of PONV. These results could be confirmed and approaches for optimizing postoperative comfort, safety, and recovery explored by future multicentered research.