Patients are going without adequate sustenance before surgery and fasting guidelines need to be revised, a national meeting of anaesthetists has heard.

Fellows of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) met at Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain over the weekend for their annual rural SIG meeting.

A presentation by Dr David Rowe, an anaesthetist from Armidale in regional New South Wales, challenged the current guidelines for people fasting before morning surgery.

• The best diet for losing weight is …
• This sugary treat is ‘killing’ us
• How much exercise do we actually need?

“The standard six hours for solids and two hours for certain types of clear fluids in most people’s practise end up, by accident, running up to 12, 13, 14 hours with no calories going in,” he said.

He said the body needs energy to recover from invasive surgery.

“If you’ve depleted your stores of carbohydrates, which you do after about 12 to 14 hours, your body then starts to have to break down tissues to start liberating alternative energy sources so, muscle for protein and fat,” he said.

“These are the very tissues you want the body to be healing and repairing and building up again once the surgeon’s made his incision.

“So the logic doesn’t fit.”

Dr Rowe told the conference patients reported less hunger, thirst, headache and nausea when they arrived at operating theatres when allowed nutrients in the form of clear, carbohydrate-rich fluids two hours before anaesthesia.

He said there were clear fluids available from pharmacies that “look and taste like flat lemonade”.