Effectiveness of Pain Control Regimen with Local Infiltrative Analgesia for Total Knee Replacement: A Prospective, Double-blind, Randomized Controlled Trial

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Introduction: Postoperative pain relief in total knee replacement remains a major determinant in the duration of the hospital stay and return to daily activities. Nowadays, a great attention has been given to pain management in the perioperative period focusing on faster recovery.
Various analgesic regimens have been in use. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of our pain control regimen along with the use of local infiltration analgesia (LIA) in terms of postoperative pain control. Materials and methods: A total of 50 patients were included in the study, and they were randomized into study group and control group by
computerized randomization, and the study group was followed up with the multimodal pain relief protocol, while the control group was given a placebo; the results were measured with preoperative and postoperative visual analog score (VAS) and results were analyzed. Results: Visual analog score showed a drastic fall of average 4.36 scale parameters compared with the preoperative in the study group and a
significant difference of 1.88 on VAS scale compared with postoperative score of the control group. The mean postoperative score was 3.88 in a scale of 10 in the study group, while it remained 5.76 in the control group.
Conclusion: Our pain management protocol using effective LIA along with the pain control regimen has revolutionized postoperative recovery. Pain control and patient satisfaction were extremely high. The average length of hospital stay has been reduced to 2.12 days with the implementation of this regimen, with most of them discharged within 24 hours and all of them by second day.