• Acta Anaesthesiol Scand · May 1999

    Chronic pain after thoracic surgery: a follow-up study.

    • K Perttunen, T Tasmuth, and E Kalso.
    • Department of Anaesthesia, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland.
    • Acta Anaesthesiol Scand. 1999 May 1;43(5):563-7.

    BackgroundThe incidence of long-term post-thoracotomy pain is reported to be up to 67%. A relationship between the severity of acute postoperative pain and the development of chronic post-thoracotomy pain has been suggested.MethodsPatients scheduled for elective thoracotomy were interviewed before and one week after surgery to find out if they had pain before surgery and how much pain they experienced postoperatively. The amount of analgesics the patients were given were registered during the first 5 postoperative days. The patients were interviewed by letter 3, 6 and 12 months after surgery to find out if they still had pain due to surgery and to what extent this pain interfered with their daily activities.ResultsOne hundred and ten patients entered the study. Information about the complete study period was obtained from 67 patients. The incidence of chronic post-thoracotomy pain was 80% at 3 months, 75% at 6 months and 61% one year after surgery. The incidence of severe pain was 3-5%. Chronic post-thoracotomy pain interfered with the patient's normal daily life in more than half of the patients. High consumption of analgesics during the first postoperative week was associated with a higher risk of chronic post-thoracotomy pain.ConclusionA significant proportion of patients undergoing thoracotomies will suffer from chronic pain. Surgeons and anaesthetists should be aware of this fact and they should look for effective means of preventing and treating this pain syndrome.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…