The trajectory of postoperative pain following mastectomy with and without paravertebral block

Evidence to support the argument that general anesthesia (GA) with paravertebral block (PVB) provides better pain relief for mastectomy patients than GA alone is contradictory. The aim of this study was to explore pain and analgesia after mastectomy with or without PVB during acute inpatient recovery. A retrospective study was conducted in a single hospital providing specialist cancer services in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. We explored pain and concomitant analgesic administration in 80 consecutive women recovering from mastectomy who underwent GA with (n = 40) or without (n = 40) PVB. A pain management index (PMI) was derived to illustrate the efficacy of management from day of surgery (DOS) to postoperative day (POD) 3. Patients who reported no pain progressively increased from DOS (n = 12, 15%) to POD 3 (n = 54, 67.5%). Most patients were administered analgesics as a combination of acetaminophen and a strong opioid on DOS (n = 53, 66.2%), POD 1 (n = 45, 56.2%), POD 2 (n = 33, 41.2%), and POD 3 (n = 21, 26.2%). Less than 6% of patients on any POD were administered multimodal anlagesics. PMI scores indicate some pain in the context of receiving weak and strong opioids for GA patients and more frequent use of nonopioid analgesics in PVB patients during recovery. These findings highlight the need for data describing patterns of analgesic administration in addition to reports of postoperative pain to determine the most effective means of avoiding postoperative pain in patients who require mastectomy.