The Effectiveness of Vitamin C in Postoperative Pain Management of Single-level Posterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion (PLIF)
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2014-05-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Postoperative pain management remains a major challenge for surgeons. Despite huge
technological advances in pain management, many researchers have documented that unrelieved
pain remains common after surgeries, which is estimated that up to 75% of patients do not
achieve adequate pain relief postoperatively. The major goal in the management of
postoperative pain is to minimize the dose of medications to lessen the side effects while
still providing adequate analgesia, because side effects of commonly used pain medications
are known to be the reasons that could lead to inadequate postoperative pain treatment. This
goal is best accomplished with multimodal analgesia. One agent that can exert antinociceptive
and pain reducing effects is vitamin C.
Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is water-soluble, found throughout the body and is especially
highly concentrated in the brain, which has antioxidant and neuroprotective properties.
Moreover, it has been proven that the plasma vitamin C concentration decreases after surgery
and the requirement for vitamin C increases in surgical patients, possibly due to greater
demand caused by increased oxidative stress. Regarding the effect of vitamin C on acute pain,
a result from a recent study with the aim to evaluate the potential role of vitamin C in
reducing acute pain after laparoscopic cholecystectomy showed that supplementation with oral
vitamin C significantly decreased morphine consumption after surgery.
Although vitamin C has potential for relieving postoperative pain, there has not been studied
regarding the effectiveness of vitamin C for spine surgery, to date. This trial aimed to
evaluate the effectiveness of vitamin C for surgery of lumbar spine.