Importance of postoperative pain and possibilities of prevention and treatment

Abstract

The paper presents the importance of acute postoperative pain, the risk factors for its occurrence and intensity, instruments for its measurement and assessment, as well as the possibilities of prevention and treatment. The fact that post-surgical pain represents not only a subjective unpleasant experience for the patient, but also a factor that significantly contributes to complications and unfavorable outcomes of surgical treatment is well known. Despite that, postoperative pain can be seen very often. To successfully prevent and relieve pain, it is necessary to establish a possible cause-and-effect relationship between the occurrence and intensity of postoperative pain, type of surgical intervention, anesthesia technique, demographic characteristics of patients, comorbidities, chronic therapy, and family and socioeconomic factors. Besides the application of recommendations from the current guidelines and protocols for the prevention and treatment of post-surgical pain to achieve positive treatment outcomes, an individual approach to each patient and the application of multimodal analgesia techniques that include the use of different classes of analgesics, co-analgesics, and non-pharmacological measures, based on modern ERAS-protocols aimed at accelerated recovery after surgical intervention should also be employed.