investigation of safety and efficacy of intravenous paracetamol in pain management following cardiac surgery

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

Inadvertent intrathecal injection of atracurium

This report relates how tracurium was given by mistake, intrathecally, during spinal anesthesia, to a 38-year-old woman, who was a candidate for abdominal hysterectomy. When no analgesia was observed, the mistake in giving the injection was understood. She was evaluated postoperatively by train of four ratio, measuring her breathing rate, eye opening, and protruding of tongue at one, two, twenty-four, and forty-eight hours, and then at one and two weeks, with the final evaluation the following month. The patient had normal timings during the operation and postoperation periods, and no abnormal findings were observed through the first month. This finding was contrary to several studies, which described adverse reactions due to accidental intrathecal injection of neuromuscular blocking drugs