DISCUSSION
In this prospective, randomized study, we sought to determine whether a more organized approach to treating postoperative pain using a specific dosing regimen or opiates in conjunction with non-opiate medications would lead to improved pain control and a decreased need for opiates. We found that adding ketorolac to the postoperative pain regimen and outlining a more detailed set of instructions could lower narcotic usage in the first 4 postoperative days. In addition, adding ketorolac decreased other complications commonly seen with narcotic usage and was shown to be safe in our patient population.
Ketorolac has been shown to decrease narcotic pain medication usage in several surgical settings and across different surgical specialties. It is hypothesized that ketorolac potentiates the effects of narcotics.11 Ketorolac given alone has a potent analgesic effect by acting as a strong non-selective cyclooxygenase inhibitor. The major drawback to ketorolac use has been its well-known side-effect profile. Ketorolac is renally excreted, and as such, should not be used in patients with renal insufficiency. In addition, ketorolac has been shown to cause increased gastrointestinal bleeding when used for >5 days.15 Caution should be taken when combining ketorolac with thromboprophylactic medications, especially in older patients.
Many surgeons use NSAIDs along with narcotics as part of a postoperative pain regimen. While this is often adequate for some procedures, when the surgery involves manipulating fractures, internal fixation, or resection arthroplasty, the variation in individual patient pain may call for a more robust protocol. Additionally, as surgeons expand to more complex procedures performed in the outpatient setting, evaluating different combinations of analgesics taken in a more structured manner may provide for improved pain control.
A major component of patient satisfaction is postoperative pain control.3-8,12,16,17 Regional anesthesia is an important tool that allows patients to undergo a surgical procedure with a greatly reduced amount of opioid pain medications. In addition, regional anesthesia can provide significant pain control after the patient has left the ambulatory surgery center, but this relief is short-lived because the medication is designed to lose effectiveness over time. As the effects of regional anesthesia wear off, patients can experience “rebound pain” with severe levels of pain that, on occasion, cannot be controlled with oral analgesics alone. The addition of ketorolac provided improved pain control when compared with the other regimens during this transition period when the regional anesthesia was becoming ineffective. In addition, because patients taking ketorolac used less narcotic medication, they experienced less nausea, vomiting, and over-sedation.
Additionally, patients were instructed to record their medication usage and pain scores on a prospective basis, with the hope of eliminating recall bias. A potential weakness is the inability to show significance for pain relief and reduced narcotic usage with the addition of ketorolac, although there was a trend toward significance. Many of the patients who enrolled in the trial did not return their medication logs. While these patients had to be excluded from data analysis, we continued enrollment until we obtained an adequate number of patients in each group. In addition, in the OxyContin group (Group 3), we could only recruit 17 participants, instead of the 18 needed based on our power study. Although this has a potential to alter the significance of our results, we do not feel this had a substantial impact on our results.
Many patients in the non-ketorolac groups supplemented their medication regimens with NSAIDs, which may have falsely lowered pain scores and narcotic usage. While this confounds our study results, we do not believe that it invalidates the conclusion that ketorolac can be an effective adjunct pain medication for use in patients undergoing ambulatory hand surgery.
The study examined postoperative pain control for only 2 procedures, thumb basal joint arthroplasty and distal radius fracture fixation, both commonly performed in the outpatient setting under regional anesthesia and both typically requiring narcotic pain medication. Perhaps the utilization of these medication regimens with different surgical procedures would have differing results.
We conclude that ketorolac potentially provides patients with improved pain control over the use of narcotic pain medications alone in the setting of ambulatory hand surgery.
This paper will be judged for the Resident Writer’s Award.