Perioperative anesthesia

Background. Ensuring adequate analgesia is a prerequisite for rapid recovery after surgery. Improving the management of acute pain is important to ensure the safe and effective analgesia needed for early mobilization and for avoidance of organ dysfunction due to inadequate analgesia. For this purpose, multimodal analgesia (MMA) is used. It includes opioid analgesics, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID), paracetamol or metamizole, local anesthetics and ancillary drugs. Objective. To describe modern views on perioperative analgesia. Materials and methods. Analysis of literature data on this issue. Results and discussion. MMA involves an opioid-preserving approach (reducing the dose of opioids without reducing the quality of analgesia), procedure and patient specificity. The postoperative recovery improvement program includes several items, three of which have been associated with a reduction in treatment duration, namely, multimodal prevention of postoperative nausea and vomiting, perioperative NSAID use, and post-operative opioid protocol. The combined use of NSAID and paracetamol provides a better result than the use of each of these drugs alone. At the correct dose, paracetamol (Infulgan, “Yuria-Pharm”) is an effective non-opioid analgesic for the treatment of acute pain with minimal side effects for a long time. Pre- and intraoperative administration of paracetamol is recommended in a number of guidelines. Intravenous administration of local anesthetics is an another important component of MMA. The 2016 Cochrane review showed that long-term intravenous perioperative infusion of lidocaine significantly reduced the postoperative need for opioids. However, the meta-analysis of 10 randomized controlled trials found that perioperative intravenous lidocaine did not differ from placebo in post-operative pain assessed with the help of a visual analog scale and in opioid requirements (Rollins K.E., 2020). Similar results have been obtained in other studies in recent years. Inclusion of nefopam in MMA can reduce the dose of opioids. The use of nefopam, paracetamol and deksketoprofen makes it possible to dramatically reduce the use of morphine. Neither pain nor postoperative recovery can be adequately controlled with a single treatment due to the multifactorial nature of the problem. It is recommended to use MMA, but there are no recommendations for optimal combinations of analgesics for specific procedures. Administration of paracetamol and NSAID in combination with the use of regional techniques is a golden standard of MMA. Conclusions. 1. After the surgery, the patient should be adequately anesthetized. 2. To achieve optimal, preferably non-opioid, analgesia, it is recommended to use MMA. 3. NSAID, paracetamol, nefopam and regional techniques are the important components of MMA.