Preemptive lornoxicam for postoperative pain relief in patients undergoing lumbar disk surgery

Lornoxicam is a relatively new and non opioid analgesic belonging to the oxicam group. The aim of this study to investigate preemptive analgesic effect of lornoxicam. This study was carried out in a prospective, randomized, double-blind fashion with 60 patients (ASA I or II) undergoing lumbar mikrosurgical discectomy. They were divided into three groups. Group-I (n=20, preemptive group) patients received IV lornoxicam (8 mg) before surgery, Group-II (n=20, intraoperative group) patients received IV 2 mL saline solution before surgery and 8 mg IV lornoxicam before skin closure and Group-III (n=20, control group) patients received IV 2 mL saline before surgery and before skin closure. Postoperative analgesia was maintained by patient controlled intravenous morphine. The visual analogue scale (VAS) was used to assess the pain level. The amount of morphine used by the patients and VAS were assessed at the 0, 15, 30, 45, 60th minutes and the 2, 4, 6, 12, 24th hours postoperatively and the total morphine consumption was noted. Group-I demonstrated significantly reduced pain scores compared to Group-II and Group-III. The pain scores of Group-II were relatively lower than Group-III, but MTM and TMT are not statistically meaningful. We determined only nausea-vomiting as adverse effect for all groups. Nausea-vomiting incidences of Group-I and Group-II were meaning less than Group-III. In this study; lornoxicam administered preemptively appeared to improve the quality of postopertaive analgesia and led to reduced consumption of opioid analgesic postoperatively.