The Annals of pharmacotherapy
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study
Opioid analgesics versus ketorolac in spine and joint procedures: impact on healthcare resources.
Ketorolac's efficacy as a postoperative analgesic has been shown to be comparable to that of narcotic analgesics, but with significantly fewer narcotic-related adverse events. ⋯ Despite the higher acquisition cost of medication, healthcare resource utilization and total per-patient cost of treatment were lower for patients in the ketorolac group compared with patients in the narcotic analgesic study group. The majority of patients in the ketorolac group were also given concurrent narcotic analgesics; therefore, the beneficial effects observed may be secondary to the combination of ketorolac and narcotic analgesics.