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Chronic Pain: The Peri-operative Management of Chronic Pain Patients and Chronic Pain After Abdominal Surgery

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Analgesia in Major Abdominal Surgery

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Abstract

Although the diagnostic criteria are not standardised the incidence of development following abdominal surgery is high. It is a serious complication with significant effects on quality of life and develops at variable time after surgery, often more than 6 months. Management is aimed at preventing the development of new chronic postsurgical pain (correlated with the intensity of acute pain) by optimizing multimodal analgesia and optimally managing acute post-operative pain in existing chronic pain patients. For the latter group this requires careful pre-operative planning between clinicians and acute pain teams to prevent withdrawal from any chronic opiate medication and effectively monitor and manage their acute post-operative pain. Although evidence is lacking regarding the optimal analgesic techniques in this patient group it seems sensible to maximise the use of non-opioid analgesics and regional techniques due to their opiate tolerance.

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  1. Department of Anaesthesia, Royal Cornwall Hospital, Cornwall, UK

    Robert Searle & Nicholas Marshall

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  1. Robert Searle
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Correspondence to Nicholas Marshall .

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  1. Department of Anaesthetics and Critical Care, Royal Blackburn Hospital, Blackburn, Lancashire, UK

    Anton Krige

  2. Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Virginia Commonwealth University Hospital, Richmond, VA, USA

    Michael J. P. Scott

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Searle, R., Marshall, N. (2018). Chronic Pain: The Peri-operative Management of Chronic Pain Patients and Chronic Pain After Abdominal Surgery. In: Krige, A., Scott, M. (eds) Analgesia in Major Abdominal Surgery. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94482-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94482-1_15

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