Milan Z. Analgesia after liver transplantation. World J Hepatol 2015; 7(21): 2331-2335 [PMID: 26413222 DOI: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i21.2331]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Zoka Milan, MD, PhD, FRCA, FRCIM, Consultant Anaesthetist, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Visiting Professor, King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, SE5 9RS London, United Kingdom. zoka.milan@kcl.ac.uk
Research Domain of This Article
Anesthesiology
Article-Type of This Article
Minireviews
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Hepatol. Sep 28, 2015; 7(21): 2331-2335 Published online Sep 28, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i21.2331
Analgesia after liver transplantation
Zoka Milan
Zoka Milan, King’s College Hospital, SE5 9RS London, United Kingdom
Zoka Milan, King’s College School of Medicine, SE5 9RS London, United Kingdom
Author contributions: Milan Z designed research, performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There is no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Zoka Milan, MD, PhD, FRCA, FRCIM, Consultant Anaesthetist, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Visiting Professor, King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, SE5 9RS London, United Kingdom. zoka.milan@kcl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44-203-329990000
Received: April 14, 2015 Peer-review started: April 16, 2015 First decision: May 18, 2015 Revised: May 26, 2015 Accepted: September 2, 2015 Article in press: September 7, 2015 Published online: September 28, 2015 Processing time: 162 Days and 6.2 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: Based on several papers published over the last two decades, there is a general assumption that pain following liver transplantation (LT) is less intense than pain following other major abdominal procedures and that the postoperative opioid consumption is lower than for other hepatobiliary procedures. There is also an assumption that patient-controlled opioid analgesia is the only mode of postoperative analgesia for this group of patients. In this paper, we challenged that opinion and addressed the specificity of postoperative pain intensity and treatment in LT patients. We also explored all options in pain control, in addition to patient-controlled analgesia, including epidural analgesia, transversus abdominis plane block and wound catheter infiltration.
