Background & Objective: With consideration the daily increased development of outpatient surgeries and high rate of these operations in elderly patients, rapid and safe recovery of patients for coming back to daily life is necessary. In this clinical trial study recovery time and nausea and vomiting after the use of two rapid-onset narcotic, alfentanil and remifentanil in elderly patients has been compared.

  Methods: In this double-blind clinical trial 40 elderly patients (age above 65) candidated to cataract surgery with general anesthesia were studied. The patients were divided randomly into two groups and for first group alfentanil was injected 10 m g/kg and for second group remifentanil 0.5 m g/kg during 30 seconds one minute before induction. Both two groups were under general anesthesia with same method and during the anesthesia first group took infusion of alfentanil 1 m g/kg/min and second group remifentanil 0.1 m g/kg/min. At the end of surgery the time intervals between end of anesthesia drug adminstration and autonomic respiration, eyes opening with stimulation, verbal response and discharge of recovery room, also the incidence of complications related to narcotic drugs especially nausea and vomiting were recorded. The data were analyzed in SPSS software using descriptive and analytical statistics as T-test, chi square and ANOVA.

  Results: The time of autonomic respiration in alfentanil group was 2 minutes and in remifentanil group 3.3 minutes,this time in alfentanil groupe1.3 minutes shorter but the difference was not significant. The time of eyes opening with stimulation, verbal response and discharge of recovery room were not significantly different. During recovery incidence of nausea and vomiting in remifentanil group (30% of patients) was significantly more than alfentanil group (5% of patients) (P<0.05).

  Conclusion: The time of recovery between alfentanil and remifentanil group was not significantly different, but incidence of nausea and vomiting in remifentanil group was higher than alfentanil group significantly.