Administration of conscious sedation by a neuroradiology team during percutaneous vertebroplasty and spinal biopsy procedures

Introduction Percutaneous vertebroplasty, i.e. the consolidation of a vertebral body with polymethylmethacrylate, is a safe and effective image-guided technique increasingly used as a treatment option for different pathologic conditions, mainly vertebral body fractures secondary to osteoporosis, hemangiomas and metastasis. The procedure, although minimally invasive, could be painful and is better tolerated if a conscious sedation regimen is added to local anesthesia. An anesthesiologist usually performs the sedo/analgesia, but frequently, he is not available in our angiography unit, so we have begun to perform the sedo/analgesia ourselves following an analogous situation that physicians of the Digestive Endoscopic Unit of our institution experienced some years ago.