Post-operative pain control is a major factor of modern anesthesia care. Recent advances, such as multimodal analgesia, regional anesthesia techniques and opioid free anesthesia have significantly impacted the way we care for our patients in the perioperative period and has impacted patient comfort and satisfaction. Moreover, considering increasing age of patients addressed for surgery, as well as the high incidence of severe co-morbidities, providing safe anesthesia care in terms of perioperative management has become a crucial aspect of modern anesthesia practice.
Choosing one technique for pain control over another has become challenging and objective assessment of pain severity is still a debatable issue. In this context, perioperative pain medicine has become more complex than ever and, hence it has evolved into a new branch of perioperative medicine comprising of new insights on advanced monitoring, pharmacology and neurophysiology.
BMC Anesthesiology has published a topical collection on “Post-operative pain control” focusing on new research in this field focusing on novel analgesics, multimodal anesthesia and regional anesthesia making the step to a personalized perioperative pain control.
This collection comprises submissions from all aspects of this field including, but not limited to:
• Novel analgesics: new approaches to pain management, such as the development of novel analgesics, including non-opioid medications, and new routes of administration, such as transdermal and intranasal.
• Multimodal anaesthesia: The use of a combination of medications to provide pain relief after surgery, including local anaesthetics, opioids, and non-opioid analgesics, as well as non-pharmacological techniques such as nerve blocks, and cognitive behavioural therapy.
• Regional anaesthesia: The use of nerve blocks, epidurals, and other regional anaesthesia techniques to provide targeted pain relief after surgery.
• Personalized perioperative pain control: The use of patient-specific factors, such as age, comorbidities, and genetic variations, to individualize pain management plans.
• Postoperative pain assessment: Advances in pain assessment techniques and tools, including the use of patient-reported outcomes and wearable devices.
• Pharmacogenomics: The use of genetic information to optimize pain management by identifying medications that are most effective and safe for individual patients.
• Economic impact: The economic impact of improved pain management, including reductions in healthcare costs, length of hospital stays, and readmissions.
• Pain assessment: research on new methods of measuring pain and assessing the effectiveness of pain management strategies.
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