Local Anesthetic Infiltration to Prevent Postoperative Pain After Lumbar Surgery

Summary

Posterior lumbar arthrodesis causes severe postoperative pain, hampering patients's postoperative reconvalescence especially functional rehabilitation. Efficient and safe methods for postoperative analgesia are, therefore, mandatory. The application of opioids are the most frequently used therapies for postoperative pain relief but it very often results side effects. Local anesthetic wound infiltration is widely recognized as a useful adjunct in a multimodal approach to postoperative pain management. In the setting of spine surgery, a single bolus administration of a local anesthetic is a useful method (with a reduction in parenteral morphine consumption during the 48 first hours) but has a limited effect because of its short duration of action. Prolonged administration through a multi-holed catheter positioned by the surgeon at the end of the procedure could increase the duration of action and may thereby improve the efficacy of local wound infiltration. Easy and effective, this new modality of administration has expanded the indications for parietal infiltrations toward major painful procedures. We designed this study to determine whether local anesthetic (compared with saline solution) continuous wound infiltration during the first two days after posterior lumbar arthrodesis on degenerative spine, could improve postoperative analgesia at short-term but particularly at mid-term (two months) and long-term (six months), in order to decrease postoperative lumbar pains (resulting in best life quality, opioid consumption limited and rehabilitation hastened) and postoperative hyperalgesia areas. The postoperative analgesic and antihyperalgesic efficacies; the postoperative rehabilitation at mid-term and long term, and the safety of opioid administration and multi-holed parietal catheter will be compared in the two groups (control and study).

Timeline

Start

2009-01

Primary completion

2010-04

Completion

2010-08

Drugs

Indications

No indication recorded.