An Investigation of Safety and Efficacy of Intravenous Paracetamol in Pain Management Following Cardiac Surgery

Abstract

Introduction: Optimum pain management immediately after surgeries can lower the possibility of pain syndrome and its following consequences. Opioids are amongst the analgesics used for postoperative pain control; however, their application can bring about several adverse effects. In this study, all the published articles regarding efficacy of Paracetamol in post-cardiac surgery pain management were systematically reviewed. Materials and Methods: Pubmed and Scopus were searched for relevant articles. The employed search strategy was as follows: (Paracetamol OR Acetaminophen OR Propacetamol) AND (pain OR analgesia) AND coronary. All the English-language articles (with no time restriction), investigating the effectiveness of Acetaminophen in comparison with other analgesics or placebo, were included in the study. All the articles examining the efficacy of Paracetamol in combination with other analgesics were excluded from the search results. Results: On the whole, our electronic search retrieved 192 articles from PubMed and 365 articles from Scopus. After screening the titles, abstracts, and full texts of the search results, only 5 English-language articles met our inclusion criteria. Conclusion: Although Paracetamol demonstrated considerable efficacy in minimizing application of post-operative opioids, its strength in soothing post-operative pain is not significantly different from opioids. Further, conducting randomized-controlled-trials with large sample size are necessary to accurately reveal the efficacy of Paracetamol in curtailing application of opioids in post cardiac surgeries.

Keywords

• Acetaminophen
• Cardiac Surgery
• Pain Management
• Paracetamol