Risk of Failed Epidural in Patients With and Without Chronic Pain and Opioid Use

Patients with chronic pain syndrome (CPS) may develop central sensitization wich may lead to increased pain intensity and lower pain threshold sometimes to the extend of hyperalgesia and allodynia. Furthermore, patients with daily use of opioids may develop opioid tolerance, and to a lesser extent opioid induced hyperalgesia.

These factors may lead to a higher pain intensity in the perioperative setting resulting in the observed increased opioid dosage needed to treat the acute pain. Furthermore opioid titration may be difficult with higher levels of pain and a higher risk of opioid related adverse effects incl. respiratory depression and sedation.

The factors above advocate for utilizing opioid sparing analgesic techniques. In our department as in many others we use an multimodal opioid sparing approach for surgical procedures including epidural anesthesia (EA) as a standard part of the perioperative analgesia strategy after upper laparotomy, as a sufficient epidural anesthesia has shown to provide a stable and often better pain relief than systemic opioids in these patients.

Clinically, there is a suspicion that patients with CPS on fixed opioid treatment have a higher frequency of need for epidural optimization, despite the lack of an anatomical reason for this. One potential explanation could be an altered nociception, requesting another EA strategy than in non-opioid patients.

Purpose and hypothesis This study will explore the frequency of failed EA, defined as EA with insufficient analgesic effect to the extent were replacements of the epidural is needed within the first 5 postoperative days (PODs), testing the hypothesis that failed epidural occurs more frequent in patients with CPS on fixed opioid treatment than in non-opioid patients without CPS.