Articles: postoperative-pain.
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A main target of surgical treatment is to minimize postoperative pain. The aim of this study was to evaluate the benefit of quality management on postoperative pain and to improve pain therapy. ⋯ A simple pain management system in a general surgical ward led to considerable improvement in postoperative pain scores as assessed by visual analogue scale.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Jul 2004
Preoperative sciatic nerve block decreases mechanical allodynia more in young rats: is preemptive analgesia developmentally modulated?
Postoperative sensitivity to tactile stimuli differs as a function of age. In this study, we hypothesized that preoperative sciatic nerve block (SNB), by providing preemptive analgesia, would result in better analgesia than postoperative SNB in the young rat. With the paw incision model of postoperative pain, male Sprague-Dawley rats, aged 2 or 4 wk, underwent general anesthesia and then received a left SNB with 5 microL/g of 0.5% bupivacaine or normal saline. ⋯ At 24 h, the threshold was 4.0 +/- 0.7 g in the preoperative SNB group compared with 1.6 +/- 0.3 g in the postoperative SNB group (P = 0.004). There was no difference at any time point between the preoperative and the postoperative SNB in the 4-wk-old animals. These results suggest that preoperative SNB in young animals provides a preemptive analgesic effect on mechanical allodynia that is age or developmentally dependent.