Articles: post-operative.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Apr 2023
Randomized Controlled TrialNociception Level Index-Guided Intraoperative Analgesia for Improved Postoperative Recovery: A Randomized Trial.
Nociception is the physiological response to nociceptive stimuli, normally experienced as pain. During general anesthesia, patients experience and respond to nociceptive stimuli by increasing blood pressure and heart rate if not controlled by preemptive analgesia. The PMD-200 system from Medasense (Ramat Gan, Israel) evaluates the balance between nociceptive stimuli and analgesia during general anesthesia and generates the nociception level (NOL) index from a single finger probe. NOL is a unitless index ranging from 0 to 100, with values exceeding 25 indicating that nociception exceeds analgesia. We aimed to demonstrate that titrating intraoperative opioid administration to keep NOL <25 optimizes intraoperative opioid dosing. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that pain scores during the initial 60 minutes of recovery are lower in patients managed with NOL-guided fentanyl than in patients given fentanyl per clinical routine. ⋯ More intraoperative fentanyl was given in NOL-guided patients, but NOL guidance did not reduce initial postoperative pain scores.