Introduction:

15-20% of patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty were not satisfied and the most common causes were residual pain and limited function. Epidural analgesia or peripheral nerve blocks have traditionally been used as analgesia.

Objective:

To evaluate the efficacy of infiltration with epinephrine, ketorolac, morphine and ropivacaine solution in postoperative total knee replacement patients.

Material and methods:

Observational, cross-sectional, retrospective and analytical cohort study. We included patients with gonarthrosis aged 18 to 100 years scheduled for total knee replacement surgery from May 2018 to August 2021; with documentation of their clinical, demographic, baseline, pre-surgical and postoperative pain data at 24 hours. Infiltrated patients were compared with those receiving intravenous analgesia.

Results:

A total of 66 patients with a mean age of 69.1 were included;65.2% were women. Forty-three point nine percent had left-sided involvement, 50% had a classification of Kellgren-Lawrence III and 31.8% had a grade IV. Thirty-six patients (54.5%) formed the control group, while 30 (45.5%)received the intervention with the analgesic cocktail. With regard to pain,a lower median pain was found by visual analog scale in patients with the intervention (2 vs 8 points, p < 0.001); most with the cocktail they found no pain (66.7%) or mild pain (23.3%) and no patient in the control group reached it (p < 0.001). All patients of the control group required rescue analgesia, while only 30% of the intervention group used it (p < 0.001).

Conclusion:

The use of trans-surgical local infiltration decreases postoperative pain and the requirement of analgesics and rescue analgesia during the first 24 hours.