• Jin Woo Shin, Carlo Pancaro, Chi Fei Wang, and Peter Gerner.
• Department of Anesthesiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St., Boston, MA 02115, USA.
• Anesth. Analg. 2008 Nov 1;107(5):1587-91.

BackgroundChronic pain after thoracotomy has been recently reproduced in a rat model that allows investigation of the effect of drugs that might reduce the incidence of allodynia after thoracotomy. Previous studies suggest that intrathecal or systemic morphine, clonidine, neostigmine, and gabapentin reduce the incidence of allodynia in the rat postthoracotomy pain model. Our purpose was to test whether intercostal and systemic injection of bupivacaine prevented the development of allodynia in an animal model of chronic intercostal neuropathic pain.MethodsMale Sprague-Dawley rats were anesthetized and the right 4th and 5th ribs surgically exposed. The pleura were opened and the ribs were retracted for 1 h. Intercostal or systemic bupivacaine 1 mg (0.2 mL at 0.5%) was injected before and after surgery, or before surgery; a control group underwent rib retraction and did not receive any drug. Rats were tested for mechanical allodynia at a predetermined area around the incision site during the 3 wk after surgery.ResultsAllodynia developed in 43% of the animals that did not receive bupivacaine (control group); in contrast, allodynia developed in only 6%, 12%, and 12% of those animals that received intercostal bupivacaine before surgery, after surgery, or systemically before surgery, respectively.DiscussionPrevious studies suggest that allodynia after rib retraction can be prevented by opioids, alpha2-adrenergic agonists, neostigmine, and gabapentin. The current results suggest that bupivacaine is effective in preventing mechanical allodynia, whether given by intercostal injection before or after surgery, or systemically before surgery.

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