Predictors of postop pain in spine surgery patients

Editor's Note

The use of nonopioid analgesics intraoperatively was one of eight factors found to predict postoperative pain in the first 24 hours after spine surgery, finds this study that will be presented Saturday April 21 at the 2018 World Congress on Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine in New York City.

Though it is known that the use of one class of nonopioid analgesic intraoperatively is associated with reduce postoperative pain, this study found that the intraoperative use of two or more different classes of nonopioid analgesics was associated with a much larger and clinically significant reduction in postoperative pain, regardless of the classes of nonopioid analgesics used.

The analysis involved the development of a predictive model of postoperative pain after spine surgery using a machine-learning algorithm to integrate disparate classes of perioperative data. A total of 1,008 patients who had spine surgery were included in the analysis.